Scholarly writing about scrapbooks—which has centered on examples found tucked away in attics and archives—often describes these compiled objects as fugitive, fractured, or fragmentary. In fact, scholarship on scrapbooks and other albums has itself been elusive, scattered among journals that address the conventions of visual culture, the content and forms of autobiography, the conservation of ephemera, the private manipulation of commodities, and the interaction of text, image, and practice. For some years, Susan Tucker’s on-line bibliography at Tulane University has worked to corral this literature into one space, so it is not surprising that Tucker helped bring together The Scrapbook in American Life, a volume of essays billed by its publisher as “the first book about the history and practice of keeping scrapbooks.”
Tucker and her co-editors, Katherine Ott and Patricia Buckler, are curators and cultural critics who hold posts in a women’s research center, a national museum, and an English department, and this collection reflects their own primary engagements with non-contemporary texts. In addition to collaborating on a wide-ranging and reference-rich introduction, each editor has contributed an essay: Tucker examines two scrapbooks constructed by African Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century, Ott explores nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scrapbooks that document medical training and experience, and Buckler investigates an antebellum scrapbook whose topic is the United States’ war with Mexico. The Scrapbook in American Life is dominated by contributors with similar interests and training: they include (art) historians, librarians and archivists, museum curators, and English professors. Though a few of the volume’s fifteen main essays contemplate the aesthetic aspects of albums and the processes used to create them, many contributors are more concerned with discovering the social and referential meanings of archived—and thus often decontextualized—artifacts.
A persistent theme is the intersection of the private and the public; that is, individual experiences, creative choices, and personal connotations are examined in relation to shared histories, commercial products, and published texts. The blurring of private and public partakes of ongoing feminist attempts to rewrite entrenched narratives about women’s activities and realms of influence, and it makes sense that such a theme would emerge in this collection: in the United States, both the study and the practice of album-making are gendered pursuits. Fourteen of the book’s fifteen contributors are women, and many (though certainly not all) of the albums under consideration were created by women as well. But the volume’s private/public focus also stems from characteristics of the genre itself. If the personal meanings and contexts indexed in scrapbooks can be difficult to recover over time, more public interpretations can still be deduced by attending to the relations among arranged and ordered objects. Drawing on the work of Susan Stewart and Susan Pearce, several authors note that scrapbooks can function both as private souvenirs/metonyms and as public collages/collections, and the intersection of the two modes fosters a productive multiplicity.
Because these essays consider material objects, description plays a prominent role throughout the volume. Coupling verbal sketches with sixty-three black-and-white illustrations, these sixteen chapters represent the array of items and events people have deemed worthy of preservation and perusal. Album keepers documented the Chicago World’s Fair, friends and family, Sunday school achievement, post office murals, cinema stars, and commercial advertisements, thus commenting on everything from lived social networks to visions for interior decor and fantasies about life beyond present cultural horizons. The essays in this volume also survey the varied sites in which scrapbooks have been created, by people in a range of subject positions. Album makers represented here include pedagogically engaged children, Black collegians, avante garde artists, American novelists, single women, male lovers on holiday, medical students, Nevada prostitutes, and Japanese students sequestered in internment camps. The scrapbooks are often read as compiled evidence—of unjust social conditions, of achievement and leisure, of private preferences and public engagement—but some albums also emerge as future-oriented, as tools for mastering new knowledge or expressing ambitions rather than as repositories of memory and experience.
None of the albums analyzed in this collection is a contemporary creation (the most recent scrapbook dates from the 1940s), and as archived objects most are bereft of clues to contexts of creation and display. In addition, most books offer little explicit interpretation of the items they contain. Thus, they foster conjecture and speculation, and questions of meaning loom large. As Ott explains, “The narrator who would have looked over the reader’s shoulder and excitedly pointed to the page, explaining it all, is long gone. So we are left with our imagination and our desire to connect with the past” (40-41). One interpretive option is to wax subjunctive, asking readers to “infer” or “envision” what might have been intended; however, authors in this volume also employ other strategies to get at meaning. The occasional handwritten doodle is embraced as evidence of authorial intervention and definition, and some contributors explicitly invoke intertextuality as an explanatory tool. Several albums—compiled by or for famous individuals like visual artist Hannah Höch or writers Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and Christopher Isherwood—are contextualized through reference to these artists’ other textual productions. While some essays treat related texts primarily as a way to discover denotational meaning and cross-check facts, others usefully explore how scrapbooked items frame, echo, and transform the meaning of adjacent texts and images. Jennifer A. Jolly’s chapter about a Columbian Exposition scrapbook also briefly compares two albums made by related individuals at the same time and about the same event, thus illuminating a field of potential aesthetic and thematic choices. Finally, James Kelley’s close reading of several albums looks to both contexts and co-texts; his essay reveals how records produced by the mothers of modernist writers shaped the form and content of their sons’ own gender/familial identities, scrapbooks, and works of fiction.
Sometimes, album makers are personally known to the scholars, a fact that provides some interpretive advantages. Buckler can read the artifacts in a relative’s scrapbook against temporally relevant letters also preserved in the family, and Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq can include biographical details about her grandmothers that might be difficult for a differently placed historian to discover. However, interpretive challenges remain. For instance, in her discussion of a century-spanning South Carolina receipt ledger, LeClercq refutes the image of the Southern lady as submissive and reserved, instead presenting her foremothers as “tough, smart Southern women,” decisive managers “essential to the economic and social well-being of the plantations” (43). Yet her positioning of these “diligent homemaker[s]” (50) is troubling in that she repeatedly appears to conflate the role of receipt collector with that of recipe originator or performer. The active verbs “devised,” “created,” and “concocted” are associated with the keepers of these books, despite the author’s admission that many people—including slaves and servants—contributed both texts and household labor. If a plantation mistress in the 1840s recorded a recipe for venison (51), does that necessarily mean she prepared it, or prepared it herself? Such slippage reminds one of potential disconnects among desire, documentation, creation, and use, aspects of intention and practice that are difficult to determine without direct ethnographic data or other interpretive guides. L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin’s discussion of several adolescent scrapbooks provides a useful counterpoint. Because she interviewed the album creator about her books, Melvin can describe her mother’s workspace, creation process, and goals along with the content of the albums. We learn how these collections of clippings related to school assignments and to wishful thinking and how they now evoke narratives of personal experience.
If discussion of souvenirs and collections pervades this volume, another dominant theme is the scrapbook’s enmeshment in commodity culture. Meredith Eliassen’s essay, “In the Hands of Children,” richly illustrates the range of mass-produced ephemera and supplies available to young people in decades past and suggests contexts in which their use was encouraged. Elizabeth Siegel explores the form and marketing of photo albums in the 1860s and 1870s, juxtaposing industry prescriptions for creation and display with preliminary evidence of actual consumer practice. In more scrapbook-specific examples, Tucker suggests how a pre-printed album was altered to fit the aesthetic and representational preferences of its African American owner, and Jennifer L. Bradley reads Willa Cather’s childhood scrapbook as a personal intervention in several possible cultural narratives generated by trade cards. Ellen Gruber Garvey’s contribution, a revised chapter from her The Adman in the Parlor (1996), also attends to contexts of ephemera’s production and use, approaching nineteenth-century scrapbooking as play with gender, commercial, and religious discourses. Beverly Gordon’s chapter on “scrapbook houses”—elaborate collages that depicted domestic interiors—attends more specifically to the expressive, aesthetic, and social aspects of image manipulation across generations of women.
In all, then, this is a useful collection. For those curious about the increased visibility and practice of scrapbook construction in today’s America, this volume should put to rest perceptions that scrapbooking is new, that it is newly commodified, or that it has always been dominated by women of a particular social position. The essays provide a backdrop that illuminates continuities and divergences in scrapbooking past and present. In contemporary practice, for instance, a scrapbook’s subject is not necessarily its compiler, the narratives evoked by a visual image can rarely be predicted from its denotative content, and contexts of creation and display are hugely important and change the public meanings of these ostensibly private endeavors.
--------
[Review length: 1547 words • Review posted on January 18, 2007]