Research project The book about your life. Photo album - memory - identity
The overall aim of the study is to describe and analyse the history, function and meaning of the photo album in a cultural historical, art historical and media historical context with Sweden as case study.
Project description
The three most important results of the project
Themost important results of the research project are summarized and presented in the monograph Ett medium för visuell bildning. Kulturhistoriska perspektiv på fotoalbumet 1850-1950 (A medium for visual education. Cultural historical perspectives on the photo album 1850-1950) Makadam förlag (Stockholm 2013). The overall aim of the study is to describe and analyse the history, function and meaning of the photo album in a cultural historical, art historical and media historical context with Sweden as case study. The book concerns the material aspects of the photo album as well as the practices and discoursesthathave evolved in relation to this cultural object. The empirical base for the study are photo albums (design, material, text and photographs) but also visual and textual representations (daily press,illustrated press, advertising, handbook in photographyetc.) that display how albums were used and understood in historical time. The book has a thematic make up. The first chapter, Albums in circulation, describes how albums evolved, were produced and circulated during the second half of the nineteenth century in Sweden. The study revealsthat albums were initially produced and sold by bookbinders, stationary and print shopand not bythe photographic trade. This might be one explanation for its unnoticed entrance sometime in the 1850’s. The next three chapters concern different uses of photo albums in the nineteenth century. They are all example on how the photo album can be said to mirror and construct ideas in relation to historical, social and cultural circumstances. They concern the official portrait gallery (A pocket size portrait gallery), collections of family pictures (Books for family and friends) and albums that include viewsand travels (The visual trip). In these three chapters the album is written into a historical, ideological and political context, for example its relation to the nineteenth century craze for typologies and social hierarchies and the social statistics interestin controlling the individual body in order to strengthen the development of society. The sixth chapter in the book (The album as object), describes the material forms albums have had and how their function, use andmeaning can be read out of these material aspects. As pointed out throughout the book the album was a medium and its material form was not arbitrarily. On the contrary the book like album was associated to cultivation. Through the album, the visual book, people learned to identify people and places and to discern likenesses and differences. This was simultaneously an amusement and a societal duty. Through the album people received a common visual reference. They learned about the most important people and places in their society. Furthermore there was also a common perception that people would develop their own abilities by looking at their successful fellows. New research questions generated by the project
One of the motives for this research project was ”the death” of photographic prints and the analog photo album. The same year as the project was initiated, 2006, analog cameras dissapeared from the Swedish market. Only in five years they have transformed from being the default model of camera to completely be replaced by digital cameras. As a result of this change the practice of making photo albums was about to dissappear too. Instead photographs were collected, arranged andviewed in smart phones and personal computors. The study of the understanding and uses of photo album in the nineteenth century might open up for new perspectives on contemporary uses of vernacular photography. In the same way as the photo album, the telephone and the computer are products of contemporary technical, economical and social parameters. They have apolitic and ideological bearing and through this project differences and continuities in these aspects of verncular photography will be illuminated.
The two most important publications within the project
See above for a description of the monograph Ett medium för visuell bildning. Kulturhistoriska perspektiv på fotoalbumet 1850-1950 (Stockholm: Makadam, 2013). The essay ”Dated photographs. The Personal Photo Album as a Visual and Textual Medium” analyze the fact that photographs in nineteenth century albums are very rarely dated. It was published in one of the most influential academic journals devoted to photography (Photography & Culture) in 2010. This case study exemplifies how a close study of the photo album as a material artifact reveal attitudes to photographic portraits and photography in general has changed over time. Time was not an important factor in private portraits it seems. On the contrary photographs should be as painted portraits and portray the personality. In 2008 the seminar ”Photographs in archives. A seminar on the effects of digitalization” (Fotografi i arkiv. Ett seminarium om digitaliseringens effekter) at Nordiska museet was initiated within the research project. During the seminar five researchers presented aspects on photography, archives and digitalization processes and it drew a large audience. The seminar resulted in the anthology "In the Image Archive. On Photographs and the Effects of Digitalization” (I bildarkivet. Om fotografier och digitaliseringens effekter) which Anna Dahlgren edited together with Pelle Snickars at the National Library of Sweden.
Project members
Project managers
Anna Näslund
Professor
