An evocative survey of photo albums captures the history of American photography – and asks whether we’ll ever impose order on our sprawling digital collections.
Compiled by Beatrice Banning Ayer Patton; photographed by George S Patton Jr from second world war albums, 1941-1947 ... taken from Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography. Photograph: Aperture/Library of Congress
“When you hold a photo album, you sense that you are in possession of something unique, intimate, and meant to be saved for a long time,” writes Verna Posever Curtis in the introductory essay to Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography. “As you turn the pages and look at the images, you imbibe the maker’s experience, invoking your imagination and prompting personal memories.”
I’ve been wondering about this reflection ever since I first read it a few weeks ago, mainly because this is not what the photographic album – save for my own or my family’s altogether more haphazard collections of images – evokes in me. When I see a photographic album, the first thing I think of is order: a disciplined mind; a systematic approach; a rigour that is altogether not my own; that is, in fact, the opposite of my more scattergun approach to images and memories. Indeed, I often feel there is something lifeless about the carefully composed photographic album that may be to do with the editing process: the elimination of the random, the accidental, the blurred and the botched photograph.
If truth be told, my imagination and personal memories are more likely to be evoked if I trawl though an old box of anonymous family photographs, those piles of fading, crumpled, almost discarded things that end up in car boot sales and flea markets and remind us that most lives go unmarked and unremembered save for these unmoored images that have floated free for their context and thus are imbued with a quiet but resonant sense of mystery.
Then again, I am not a curator and Curtis is. She oversees the photography and print collection at the Library of Congress and has trawled the archives there for her book selection. As its title suggests, the albums on display in Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography are no ordinary volumes. They are, in fact, a kind of potted history of mainly American photography. The albums are arranged under loose headings: Souvenirs and Mementos; Presentations; Documents; Memoirs; and, perhaps most intriguingly, Creative Process. They range in style and subject matter from Edward H Harriman’s documentation of a scientific study carried out in Alaska in 1899 at the height of the gold rush to an extensive family album complied by the photographer and film-maker Danny Lyon in 2008 and 2009.
In between, there are albums compiled by explorers, historians and anthropologists as well as celebrity photographer Phil Stearn, musicologist Alan Lomax, Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, and several other well-known image makers such as Walker Evans, W Eugene Smith and Jim Goldberg. The book shows how technology – and, in particular, the coming of the instamatic and the Polaroid – impinged on the style and the function of the photo album, often allowing photographers to use them as a kind of prototype for the more stylised photography book that would inevitably follow. It traces, too, how the photo album has moved from being a historical record, whether of an Alaskan exploration or a celebration of the Hitler Youth movement or even a party held for President Kennedy by Frank Sinatra, to a kind of artist’s book through which, as is the case with Duane Michals or Goldberg, we are given access to a creative diary or a glimpse of the way an artist works.
Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography is also perhaps an elegy for the photo album. Many of the albums included here are testaments to the art and craft of personalised book-making, one-offs that seem almost anachronistic in the age of the download and the hard drive. If the photography book is currently thriving as a medium, the old-fashioned photo album does seem very much a thing of the past.
And yet for all that, as Curtis puts it, “many people desire a physical object that can be held, paged through again and again, and shown to others”. For that very reason, the photo album has given way to the self-published photobook, an online publishing phenomenon that means you or I can create our own album using preordained templates and printed from digital files. (I have addressed the self-publishing phenomenon here.) The photobook, though, is not really the equivalent of the photo album: rather than a painstakingly compiled one-off, it can be reproduced to order and it is often wilfully non-crafted in the manner of a lo-fi musical recording.
“It is difficult,” writes Curtis, “to predict whether people will be fully satisfied with the textural uniformity of these manufactured books comprised of digital images made on demand through a commercial service.”
Using the artist/book maker Paolo Ventura as an example, Curtis is optimistic that the photo album will survive in some form or another. Ventura makes small-scale created tableaux using tiny models which he then photographs and incorporates into his large-scale art works. He records every stage of his very postmodern creative process in a series of old-fashioned, hand-crafted albums. “In the end,” concludes Curtis, “an abiding desire to tell a story with photographs will keep some form of album-making alive.” Despite my hopeless aversion to order, I hope she is right.
by Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian
June 14, 2011
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