Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
ABSTRACT: The advent of popular photography has allowed ordinary people to visu-
ally record their view of themselves and the passage of their lives. Photographs not only
record events but also allow the maker to group them for presentation in a structured
manner comparable to verbal narratives, most commonly in photo albums. We examined
more than forty albums created by amateur photographers in order to investigate the
psychological and social functions of photo albums and their value to scholars as docu-
mentations of social life. Albums are intensely personal; they create a relationship
between the presenter and the viewer; the audience is small; the possessor plays an
active role in the album's presentation; and there is an accompanying verbal narrative.
This Imrrative is crucial to the understanding of the album. This paper explores the
structure of these narratives and their role in creating the meaning of the album. In the
absence of a possessor/presenter, a narrative can be constructed by determining the type
of album being examined and establishing the personal relationships and themes within
the album. We suggest devices and procedures for reconstruction of such a narrative in
the absence of a presenter.
In the 150 years since its inception, the practice of photography has
spread widely throughout modern society. It has become integral to a
wide range of practical activities and institutions, including science,
medicine, art, crime control, advertising, insurance, politics,
intelligence-gathering, journalism, and education. One of the tasks
which confront the sociologist and cultural historian, then, is to assess
the way the practice of photography has affected the way we under-
stand ourselves and our world, and the way we engage in life.
Thanks to its sophisticated scientific, technological, and commercial
substructure, modern photography has the appearance of a very simple
process and product, but even a cursory look behind the scenes sug-
gests that the process of capturing Visual appearances is enormously
complex. The images produced are '~perhaps the most mysterious of all
the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize
as modern." (Sontag, 1977, p. 5) Analytically, if we are to understand
its impact on modern life, we must begin by posing the question of how
photography works at the human level. Why and how do people take,
save, and display photographic images? (Chalfen, 1987, p. 4).
Those questions can be asked of any particular usage of photography,
but since it has so many different applications which are superficially
dissimilar, some thought has to go into the choice of types of photogra-
phy to be examined. Certainly all of the application areas are interest-
ing and potentially fruitful to study, but in keeping with sociology's
focus on the operation of everyday life, we have structured our inquiry
around the way ordinary people make use of photography in the course
of their everyday life. That is, we take popular photography-amateur
photography-to be an appropriate subject for detailed sociological
analysis. In order to bring the enigma of amateur photography into
focus, let us first consider the differences between the intentions of
sophisticated and naive photographers.
Pictures happen. One can only trust one's sensitivity, the bounty of the
world, and the chemistry of Kodak. This is the photographic method.
And Grandma knew all about it. There was Junior in the summer sun
looking gorgeous in his diapers. Grandma was bursting with love. How
could she consume the baby and still have him? Click. Now nothing: not
age, not trouble, not dope, not tong hair, not the wrong girlfriend or
boyfriend, not death, not anything: nothing can take that moment away
from Grandma. And when she looks at the picture, all the emotion will
come b a c k . . . And if she was in any way a good photographer, it might
even come back for all of u s . . . (Lesy, 1980)
Figure 1.
F i g u r e 2.
162 QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
SLK: [2nd row, little picture on left] That's in the Lake District, at
Grassmere, I think, where Wordsworth h u n g out. We used to s p e n d - i t
doesn't say so b u t - M o t h e r , me and Maurice. It might not be, hut I'm
sure it's in the Lake District, somewhere. By the look of Maurice, I
should say he was 15 and me 12. He was a very late bloomer. His voice
didn't break 'til he was over 16.
Photo 4
SLK: [Center picture] That's Seal Rocks off San Francisco. Taken by
F a t h e r when he was living out there. He lived there for three years.
Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self 163
Photo 5
Photo 6
and I didn't pay t h e m anything. I got to live free and by golly I learnt
French because nobody spoke English. And I couldn't understand the
English teacher's English and she knew that and she asked to have an
English girl come and do that. And all I had to d o - a n d the girls were
beautifully behaved, there was no problem at all. From October to
July. That's where I put on 50 pounds because I didn't have m y period.
I ate whipped cream for desert. I didn't get any exercise because they
were afraid of me going out in the country by myself, and so on.
Photo 7
SLK: Yeh, I think so. He did used to do a few blueprints like that. And
this is the sitting room at Belvedere where Maurice was born. And, you
see, here he is with his first car! In 1920.
Photo 8
SLK: There's Emily, my grandmother, when she must have been about
80. That was at Willette.' And that's 'Goldie,' Gingin's cat.
•.. we'd sit in the kitchen and start looking at the pictures. They'd go
through them, quickly at first, one after the other or one page after the
other. But then it always happened: we'd get to one picture or one page
and they'd stop, and it was almost as if a little b o n e . . , cracked, and
they'd sit up and rise back and start talking, looking right through me,
and then they'd be gone. Back there. Gone. And they'd come back again
and say something, and then go back and start talking again; and I never
said a goddamn word except "yes" because I was back there with them,
riding the wave, holding the table, my eyes on theirs, my eyes in theirs,
breathing till it passed and the next one came. Wave after wave: recapit-
ulation, conjunction, revelation. Again and a g a i n . . .
o.. the people told me stories; they spoke parables; they made confes-
sions. They told me tales; they recounted epics; they recited myths. They
told me the way things really a r e . . . They sat alone at the center, heroes
and heroines to whom it all flowed, from which it all came. They passed
judgement. They held the scales. They told me the Truth (Lesy, 1980,
xiv).
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
(1976) and Novotny (1976) for examples of the use of pseudo narrative
to explicate 'Tound" photographs.)
Types of Albums
The first step in t h a t process is to determine what the album is about.
Every album is about something, and we have observed that there are
not very m a n y different subject-matters commonly addressed by photo
albums. The most frequent subject is the maker's family, and we would
guess that in America alone literally millions of family albums have
been produced in the past century. In order to be able to recognize a
family album, the analyst should realize that a family is not simply a
set of persons; it is instead a set of evolving relationships, activities
and achievements through which those relationships are enacted, a set
of places which are the settings for those relationships, various rituals
which celebrate those relationships, and a set of possessions (Hirsch,
1981, chap. 3). A family album pictorially weaves together images of
each of these elements to produce a visual history documenting a
miniature society which shapes, and in t u r n is shaped by, each suc-
ceeding generation. Perhaps the most obvious way to identify a family
album is by the presence of multi-generational photographs or birth-
celebrating images.
Another common album type is the event-record. Events documented
by photo albums may be private, such as a wedding or a retirement
party, or public, such as a ceremonial religious or political occasion.
Stories about events are, of course, constructed on the basis of a different
logic from stories about families, so the thematic elements of the photo-
graphs in event-record albums are likely to be different. These albums
address questions of who was there, the geographic and symbolic location
of the event, and the relationship of the photographer to the event. The
images in an event-record album are likely to be arranged chronologi-
cally, which m a y aid in both identification and interpretation.
A particular type of event that is a very common subject of photo
albums is the trip (or vacation or holiday). One of the most widely
practiced applications of photography in the contemporary world is
travel photography, and photographic travelogues can be found in
m a n y contemporary households. Sontag r e m a r k s that:
It seems positively unnataral to travel for pleasure without taking a camera
along. Photographs wilt offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made,
that the program was carried out, that fun was had (Sontag, 1977, p. 9).
Stories about leaving home are traditional in our culture. They serve
as vehicles for commenting not only on what is out there and how it
Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self 173
feels to be out there, but also on what is so special about home and how
it feels to be home.
Travelogues rely heavily on two types of photograph. One t y p e - t h e
picturesque p h o t o g r a p h - a t t e m p t s to reproduce a naturally occurring
scene which in some w a y evokes the meaning of the environs being
visited. The other type of travel photograph, the life-on-the-road photo-
graph, addresses the mundane, but out of the ordinary, features of life
away from home: restaurants and accommodations, new acquain-
tances, and especially the condition of the travel party. Travel albums
can be difficult to decode, because although the album as a whole is
about the traveler(s), each particular photo is about the world traveled
through. Hence the photographs direct the viewer's attention away
from the real subject of the album, and the viewer gets diverted trying
to figure out whether the scene is Lake Louise or Lake Victoria when
the album is really about the travelers. More so than most other types
of albums, travelogues are generally arranged chronologically, but the
analyst should attend carefully to photographs that are out of se-
quence, since they have usually been presented anachronistically for
some thematic reason.
Another album type whose logic is somewhat similar to the travel
album might be termed the autobiographical album, not because it is
filled with images of the maker, but rather because it is filled with
images of the people, places and things that were important to the
maker. Here again, the true thematic subject of the album visually
appears only incidentally, pictured with the people or things and at the
places that have been decisively meaningful in the subject's life (e.g.
Buckland, 1987). As in the travel album, the photographs are a bit
misleading because they suggest that their subjects comprise the al-
bum's theme, when it is really the significance of their content to the
album's maker that is the album's theme. On first examination, auto-
biographical albums can seem structureless: pictures of a farmhouse, a
football team picture, a '57 Ford station wagon, street scenes taken
from a fourth story window, a cat in a chair, a group of people sitting
around a table, and so on. The images themselves seem incoherent
unless the viewer realizes that the farmhouse is a birthplace, one of the
football players (the second one from the left) was a high school sweet-
heart, the station wagon was the album-maker's first car, the cat was
acquired after the death of a child, and so on. The whole assemblage
begins to acquire coherence when the viewer treats it as the context for
a life, rather than things whose meaning arise from their interrela-
tionship.
A final common type of album focuses on some special interest of the
maker, such as a hobby (every model plane I built since I was 8), a
174 QUALITATIVE SOCIOLOGY
F i g u r e 5.
Photography has been truly described as the handmaid of the arts and
sciences. It may also be appropriately termed the companion of our
hobbies, for there is scarcely a study, sport, or pastime in connection with
which photography does not occupy an important position as a recorder,
second only to the pen in value (Lund, 1895, p. 55).
The subjects of this category of album are quite diverse, but special
interest albums are recognizable by their exclusive concentration on a
Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self 175
members portrayed on the same spot or in the same pose, or are the
pictures t a k e n at m a n y different locations?
By comparing the tone and mood of earlier photographs with later
photographs, we can infer the album-maker's sense of how the family
has changed over the years. Are possessions and/or status symbols
more prominently portrayed earlier or later? How does the micro-
geography of group poses change? Are there more individual photo-
graphs earlier or later? As particular family members grow up, are
they portrayed as basically the same throughout the album? What, if
any, sense of progress, deterioration, revitalization, or collective evolu-
tion comes through the entire album-as-sequence?
These questions are m e a n t only to suggest the kind of analytic
initiative t h a t can be used to reconstruct the narrative of a family
album. The point is t h a t although a family is a very complex and
abstract transpersonal entity, and although there are numerous differ~
ent versions of the family, still there is a common structure underlying
most stories about particular families. With careful sleuthing, the
F i g u r e 6.
Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self 177
Figure 7.
kind of stories which s/he would be likely to tell about his/her travels.
As was indicated earlier, we are inclined to think that the deep struc-
ture of travel stories is an explication of the traveler him/herself, but
that the subject is usually implied rather than visually or verbally
explicit. Hence, although the analyst is confronted with images of
places and things, and is trying to infer what the album-maker would
say in reference to those images, the intermediate step is to infer what
interests and intentions led the album-maker to construct the album
out of these images in the first place. The goal is to be able eventually
to see the images through the eyes of the album-maker.
Without going into the details of how any of the other album-types
might be reconstructed, we suggest in general that just as there are a
limited number of album-types, so also there are a limited number of
story-types that would be told regarding each particular album type.
Once the analyst has deduced the overall theme of the album, it is
possible to make some educated guesses about the general structure of
the narrative which would accompany it, and by comparative inspec-
tion of the entire set of photographs to make some specific estimates of
the substantive comments that would accompany, explain, and expli-
cate the images. There is, of course, no way of knowing exactly how
accurate the reconstruction is, but the effort has been successful ff it
enables the analyst to pierce the opacity of albums unaccompanied by
a narrative. If, for instance, the analyst realized that some of the
photographs in a travel album concentrate on architectural features,
s/he might well find that other photographs which do not seem to have
any particular significance will reveal particular architectural fea-
tures whose construction is not highlighted by the composition of the
photographs themselves.
This analytic technique of reconstructing the narrative permits the
analyst to interact with the album. The images and the structural
features of the album itself are used to make deductions about the
interests and intentions of the album-maker, and then those hypoth-
eses about the album-maker are used in turn to provide an interpretive
context for each image. As each image is better understood by the
analyst, his/her inferences about the album-maker become more re-
fined, leading back to better appreciation of the images, and so on. The
technique is somewhat awkward and tentative for beginners, but with
some practice and exposure to a variety of albums, it becomes easier.
The intent of this technique is to enable the analyst to think about
the album as a unitary, structured, meaning-conveying whole, rather
Photo Albums: Images of Time and Reflections of Self 181
Figure 8.
References
Bergson, H.
1911 Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Buckland, G.
1987 "From royal albums; Queen Victoria and her descendents collected photo-
graphs of what interested them." Connoisseur 217 (902):72-77.
Chalfen, R.
1987 Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University
Popular Press.
Coe, B. & Gates, P.
1977 The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography, 1888- 1939.
London: Ash & Grant.
Corbett, K.
1986 The historical landscape: Photographs as evidence." In Jean Tucker (Ed.)
Landscape Perspectives, pp. 11-13. St. Louis: University of Missouri.
Entin, A.
1980 "Photo-therapy: Family albums and multigeneration portraits." Camera-
Lucida 1(2):39-51.
Freund, G.
1980 Photography and Society. Boston: David R. Godine.
Heilbrun, C.
1976 Lady Caroline's Album. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Hirsch, J.
1981 Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
King, G.
1978 Say "Cheese!": Looking at Snapshots in a New Way. New York: Dodd, Mead &
Co.
Krauss, D.
1980 "A summary of the characteristics of photographs which make them useful in
counseling and therapy." Camera-Lucida 1(2)7-11.
Lesy, M.
1980 Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures. New York: Random House.
Lucie-Smith, E.
1975 The Invented Eye. New York: Paddington Press.
Lund, P.
1895 Photography as a Hobby. Bradford, G.B.: Percy Lurid, Humphries & Co.
Novotny, A.
1976 Alice's World. Old Greenwich, CT: The Chatham Press.
Peters, M. & Mergen, B.
1977 "Doing the rest: the uses of photography in American Studies." American
Quarterly XXIX(3):280-303.
Schutz, A.
1967 The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: The Northwestern
University Press.
Sontag, S.
1977 On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.