Finding "me" - Mary von Rosen's photo album

Afterimage, May, 2002 by Catherine Whalen

I first saw her while browsing in a second-hand store in Wilmington, Delaware. As I flipped through a sheaf of loosely bound pages pasted with photographs, there she was: a teenage girl perched demurely on an oak-and-leather settle. [1] In the overexposed print, sunlight from an unseen window dissolved one side of her face and body, and left the other in high relief. She wore a light-colored, close-fitting dress with a lace bib-collar, a strand of pearls and a solemn expression. Underneath her photograph, she had simply written the caption "me;" at the top of the page, the year "1924." 1 closed the album, put it down, and meandered on. As I rummaged through piles of old linens and stacks of mismatched china, her image stayed with me. I turned around, walked back, and picked up the album again. It lacked a cover; instead, a cord fastened together leaves of heavy black paper. On them, "me," whoever she was, had mounted pictures of herself, her family, her friends, her pets and her travels. With white ink, she c arefully outlined the photos and inscribed captions. To some layouts, she added snippets of song lyrics such as "Ain't we got fun?" and--more daringly--cigarette wrappers. [2] Her pictorial narrative began in 1920 and ended some time after 1927.

Who was "me"? From the pages of her photo album, she emerges as a consummate American girl of the 1920s. A flapper and a flirt, she was white, middle-class and Midwestern. She loved a high-school football hero and adored horses. She lived outside Detroit, Michigan, but had family in Louisville, Kentucky. During her vacations, she cruised along the St. Lawrence Seaway and visited a dude ranch in Wyoming. Toward the end of the album, pictures of her and a certain young man hint at a growing intimacy. Maybe she married him. With paper, photographs, scissors, glue and ink, she recorded and perhaps resolved her passage from girlhood to womanhood. "Me" appears in 68 of the 232 photographs that she pasted into her album, but not once did she reveal her name. Of the nearly two hundred people pictured in her album, she identified 46 by their first names and 25 by their full names. Among the latter individuals, only a handful emerge more than once, and none more often than her boyfriend "Norm." I wondered; if I found h im, would I find her?

A Detroit newspaper clipping that she attached to her album's final page offered an important clue: an article profiling local high-school football captains, with a photo of Northern High's Norm Gabel. Here was the beau "Norm" who, except for "me" herself, appeared in the album more often than anyone else. Here, too, was a definite location: Northern High School in Detroit, Michigan.

In one of Norm's many pictures, he stands besides a new milkcar emblazoned "Gabel's Creamery." According to Detroit city directories, Philip Gabel, the owner of a creamery, lived within a few blocks of Northern High School during the early 1920s. I felt as though I were getting closer; maybe I would find out who "me" was. But how? Perhaps a high school yearbook contained a photo of her that I could compare to those in her album. I called Northern High School and spoke to a school librarian. Yes, they had yearbooks from the early twenties, and yes, they would look up alumni. She and a team of students found Norm Gabel, but not "me."

Maybe something or someone in Detroit might tell me who she was. So in the spring of 1999, I went there. With low expectations I too perused the yearbooks. In the January 1924 semiannual, The Viking, I found Norman Gabel, just as he was pictured in the photo album. About twenty pages later, I found "me," with a name beside her oval-framed image: Mary von Rosen. Her picture matched one in her album exactly. [3] Through her name, I recovered bits and pieces of Mary von Rosen's life history. Yet she told her tale best through her album. Without its painstakingly designed and subtitled images, her story would be lost. Mary von Rosen's photo album is what may be called a visual autobiography, straddling the distance between written self-works such as diaries, journals and letters, and pictorial ones like sketch books or scrapbooks.

For authors constructing self-defining narratives, forms of life-writing invoke genres of drama as well as fiction. With their emphasis on genealogical time, and repetitive, ritualistic processes of creation, autobiographical works are reenactments as well as novels. Analogously, the practices of amateur photography and album-making encompass both linear narratives and dramatic repertoires, as they consolidate multiple performances of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality and so forth into a single material artifact. They are miniature theaters, complete with sets, costumes and props as well as stars and supporting casts. In other words, visual autobiographies distinctively concretize psychological space. Photograph albums house fantasy lives, accessible by invitation only. As individual creators produce these artifacts, they remake themselves as they work out ideal, alternative or potentially transgressive identities. Omissions are crucial. The process of forgetting--that is, editing the extraneous or the unwanted, first through photography and again through album-making--begets a remembered self. Once it is complete, an album's narrative function achieves primacy. It becomes a record, destined to be replayed as a special chapter in one's life story.