Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2007 by Kristina Dunoski

Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums, by Barbara Levine and Kirsten M. Jensen. Princeton Architectural Press/208pp./$55.00 (hb).

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Around the World showcases photo albums from about 1880 to 1930 that depict travels through Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. During this period, the photo album became a visual personal memoir that developed through travelers first collecting souvenir photographs and later capturing images themselves with the first Kodak cameras. The travelers archived these expeditions with not only photographs and text, but also with collected ephemera--maps, advertisements, news clippings, hotel receipts, menus, postage stamps, ship activity programs--that can be seen as adding another dimension to their memoirs. The juxtaposition of the photographs and ephemera creates a mood that supplements the images and text; some elements are meticulously placed on the page while others are layered haphazardly. Vera Talbot's 1924 album shows her two-year travels through Asia and Africa through pages wallpapered with photographs and minimal text. As a result, the viewer enters her whirlwind, experiencing the cultures and meeting the inhabitants on each of her stops.

The authors call the found albums not only "aide-memoire[s]" but also "time machines" that allow present-day observers to see what the travelers saw and experienced by turning the pages. This physical experience--holding an album and feeling its pages--is something that is lost in digital photography and storage. Looking at these albums in an age of digital image capture makes one wonder if these analog memories will be digitally archived for future use and enjoyment or if they will ultimately be lost.

KRISTINA DUNOSKI is a recent graduate of the School of Print Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology.