Wednesday 15 June 2011

Album of the years: can photo albums survive the digital age?

From the Guardian
"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

"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."

continues

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