Albums (from the Latin albus, white) were used before the invention of photography to collect prints, drawings, music, and poems. More personal collections, often kept by women, mingled these with contributions from friends, printed ephemera, and cut-paper work. By the beginning of the 19th century, albums were essential drawingroom accessories, used as a focus for social interaction as much as for solitary contemplation. In the 1840s photographic prints were added to this tradition. Amateur and professional photographers regularly made and exchanged albums as gifts (Julia Margaret Cameron), as samplers of their work (Charles Dodgson), or as limited editions for sale (Hill and Adamson). Early photographically illustrated publications, like Henry Talbot's The Pencil of Nature (1844-6), or Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae (1843-53), were made by pasting photographs on the pages.
Carte de visite albums were the first produced especially for photographs. Their double-layered pages were pre-cut with window mounts, with slots through which the cartes were inserted. Very popular in the 1860s and 1870s, these albums mixed family portraits with those of celebrities. Designed to be displayed to visitors, they showcased the networking skills of the women of the house in keeping up social connections, and in obtaining desirable celebrity photographs. Closed, albums were decorative objects, in their tooled leather and gilt covers complete with gold clasps. Open, they could entertain visitors while the hostess was otherwise engaged, or be accompanied by a verbal commentary, varied to suit the person being addressed. More accomplished women made mixed-media albums, creating collages using cut-up photographs and watercolour or ink drawings, combining professional with amateur photographs. Often, these women's albums—for example, those of Lady Filmer—imaginatively interpreted definitions of femininity as a socially constructed role.
By the late 19th century, album manufacture had become a considerable industry, with Germany dominating the market; in 1880 there were 48 specialist firms in Berlin alone, exporting about one-third of their output to North America. Materials ranged from leather and mother-of-pearl to cheap substitutes like celluloid, with prices to match. In the 1890s a craze for novelties spawned all kinds of decorative embellishments, even integral clocks and music boxes. As gelatin emulsions, easy-to-use cameras, and processing services made photographs cheaper and more plentiful, carte de visite-and cabinet-format albums were replaced by more informal volumes with coloured, thin pages. (But albums with window mounts continued to be used, especially by committed amateurs doing their own printing, as gelatin papers were difficult to paste down without professional facilities.) Loose-leaf binders and black pages became popular after the First World War. In the 1950s postcard-sized slip-in albums made from transparent plastic pockets became popular to collect colour snapshots.
The expansion of amateur photography during the 20th century diversified the content of albums, as photographs became more intimate and varied in style and subject matter: fully organized visual diaries like the ‘baby book’; albums concentrating on one particular event like a wedding or a holiday abroad (but then sometimes including postcards, brochures, menus, and other items as well as photographs); casual albums compiled in the order in which photographs came back from processing. Categorization, however, is difficult, as photographs taken for personal uses are too often unconcerned with either following or breaking conventions, and can at the same time infinitely personalize the most staid poses and themes. Whether as a highly crafted collection, as a convenient container to store and view images, or—stretching the definition—reduced to a box of prints, the photographic album has become the main medium through which photographs are used to explore, construct, and confirm identity. Acts of self-reflection, such as looking at and collecting images of personal relevance, have become an indispensable feature of a modern sensibility. Viewing, sharing, and passing around albums has become an established ritual of familial gatherings, and a crucial aspect of the construction and maintenance of personal and cultural memories.
The metaphor of the album as a site for the construction, as much as the representation, of identity, was seized upon by artists in the 20th century, while album making has been abandoned by most professional photographers in favour of illustrated magazines, photography books, and limited-edition portfolios. The Viennese poet Peter Altenberg (1859-1919) made albums which, by combining his highly visual poems with snapshots and postcards, were an integral part of the construction of his persona as a modern flâneur, regenerating culture by taking on feminine genres and mass-produced images. A number of contemporary artists use and subvert the album, extending its range to include images of sickness and moments of abjection (Richard Billingham), and by representing unconventional ‘families’ based on bonds that are not familial in the traditional sense (Nan Goldin). In Beyond the Family Album (1979), Jo Spence rearranged her own family album, rereading it through the insights given by social history, feminism, and psychoanalysis. She reworked individual images from the past to bring out and make visible the conflicts, frustrations, and unhappiness that had been glossed over by the codes of photography, and by her mother's editing and captioning. Spence argued that the album's denials—of work, separation, illness, and daily drudgery—can be seen less as a glossing-over of realities than as evidence of frustrated maternal desires and feminine aspirations. In Sans souci (1991), a work using images found in Nazi family albums, Christian Boltanski reconsidered the cultural and historical function of photographic portraits and albums. German soldiers, photographed off duty, relaxing at home and with their families, appear only as affectionate fathers, lovers, and husbands. The family-album mode of narrative effectively, despite the uniforms, masks the fact that they are also instruments of Nazism. Their familial world is constructed as separate from the ideological and historical one. Boltanski shows how photographs convey not reality but a set of cultural codes, in this case those associated with the idealization of family life as a locus of enduring affections and benevolent feelings.
It is too early to assess the impact of digital photography on the album. On the one hand, digital techniques are dematerializing the album into infinite collections to be viewed on the computer or television screen and perhaps the Internet, where a growing number of family albums and personal or institutional collections can be inspected. On the other, the ease with which photographs can be printed digitally on a variety of surfaces and objects has facilitated a renewed emphasis on the photograph as a physical object to be touched and handled with casual but emotionally poignant intimacy.
— Patrizia di Bello
See also
family history, photography and;
phototherapy;
posing for the camera.
Bibliography
- Maas, E., “‘Das Fotoalbum 1858-1918’”, in Das Fotoalbum 1858-1918: Eine Dokumentation zur Kultur-und Sozialgeschichte (1975).
- Hirsch, M. (ed.), The Familial Gaze (1999).
- Batchen, G., “‘Vernacular Photographies’”, in Each Wild Idea (2001).
- Lensing, L., and Barker, A. (eds.), Peter Altenberg: Semmering 1912 (2002).
- Noble, A., and Hughes, A. (eds.), Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative (2003)
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