Customer Reviews

Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album

5 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a most interesting book, at least for people such as myself who have an interest in late 19th and early 20th century photography. Actually, I suspect it would also intrigue people who lack that enthusiasm but who have an interest in general social history of this period. A premise of the book is that photographs in albums are often times given added historical or literary meaning and visual interest by being placed into a personalized context by an arranger, compiler, and/or photographer. This context provides the photographs with an enhanced ability to create an historical account of a life, a portion of a life, an event, etc. - without being subservient to a text. Most of the albums presented do not have any substantial written commentary (and many have no written text other than labels for individual photographs), and rely on the images alone to provide the larger insights. The book is extensively and richly illustrated with examples drawn from the large and thoughtfully acquired collection of Barbara Levine. These examples illuminate and extend the clear and insightful commentary in the book.

The book also contains a very fine essay by the novelist Matthew Stadler discussing his ideas concerning the value of such albums that I was grateful to see, as these were ideas that would not likely have occurred to me, but were most insightful. This is a most pleasing inclusion.

The historical component of a picture is obviously improved by being placed in context. One of the most interesting features of this book then, is its visual demonstration of the wide variety of historical narrative styles that can be illustrated by albums, and even the way historical events can be illustrated without a "narrative" per se.

Definitely a valuable book for people who are interested in historical photographs. A small criticism, from my stand point is that I would have liked to have seen more albums filled with tintypes, but this is a _very_ trivial point when compared with the strengths of the book.

This book, for the reasons already mentioned by the other reviewers, is wonderful in its format and presentation of the information. I thoroughly enjoyed poring over the various albums presented and marveled at the unique creativity of each of their authors. As a person who creates scrapbooks, I admit feeling some sorrow that these albums have wandered far from their original "families," but at the same time, it gave me hope that there is an increasing respect for the folk art aspects of the "snapshot album" and that my albums -- if they go astray -- may someday be archived and revered like so many American handstitched quilts. So, I take solace in that the future my "art" is full of possibilities!

I have one small criticism: I would have liked to have seen the text printed in a slightly larger typeface. I found the small typeface difficult to read with my aging eyes -- but, I persevered and read every word!

The cover is velvet, like one of those fancy Victorian-era photo albums. "Snapshot Chronicles" accompanies an exhibition at Reed College of innumerable photographs collected by Barbara Levine. The photographs are kept together as they were in albums of their original owners; or in the case of those not going with an album, in groups of similarly pictured individuals or similar subject matter. The source of the photographs was the Kodak Brownie camera introduced as a consumer item in 1900. This quickly led to an explosion of photographs of friends, relatives, yards and neighborhoods, vacation scenes, and varied activities (much as the cell phone has spurred new kinds of communication these days, one assumes). The photos were kept in "vernacular" photo albums; whose charm to later generations is explained by Willard Morgan, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photography in 1944, "The snapshot has become, in truth, a folk art, spontaneous, almost effortless, yet deeply expressive. It is an honest art...partly because it is simply more trouble to make an untrue picture than a true picture." The hundreds of simple, yet fetching snapshots were taken before the days when artists, photojournalists, advertisers, and propagandists started to make use of cameras for their own specialized ends. Thus, the guileless, popular, vernacular snapshots can be seen as an unwitting visual social history of the era too.

I was extremely disappointed in this book. It's not worth ever a little bit and doesn't really show much of anything. I have better snapshots in my collection, both personal and ones I've picked up. It was hastily done and poorly done. The quality of the book is also bad, but cheap paper and very poor photographic reproduction.