The Face in the Lens: Anonymous Photographs

The introduction essay “Being Human” by Alexander McCall Smith reiterates Barthes ideas about the photograph as momento mori and the power that lies in photographs of strangers verse photographs of loved ones.

“Because we do not know the subjects we are not distracted by memories of the particular, and are drawn, instead, to what the photograph says about people and their ways, about the human condition. It is this that explains the poignancy of old anonymous photographs: they show us in all our human vulnerability. Our aspirations, our beliefs, our sense of ourselves are all revealed – but all of this is shown to be transient, impermanent ” (7).

The collector and author Robert Flynn Johnson also has an introductory essay in the book titled “Whole in One.” This essay begins by comparing the act of taking a great photograph akin to an amateur golfer achieving a hole in one; an improbable occurrence but one that happens often enough if we take enough photographs. This book collects photographs that are equivalent “hole in ones” and presents them according to theme. Chapters include Immaturity, Masculinity, Femininity, Compatibility, Celebrity, Singularity, Activity, Festivity, Adversity, and Inevitability.  One of the issues with found photographs is that they lack context. Arranging the photographs by subject provides an artificial order to the images and the chapters consist of some imaginative groupings. The names of the chapters are creative and more engaging than if they were put into more traditional categories.

After looking at this book, my main take away was the divide between the photo album and the lone image. The most interesting part of a photo album or scrapbook is the context that the whole provides. The parts that make up the whole may be unidentified photographs but contextually the group of materials offers much more information than the single image. Johnson has provided a framework for the lone photographs to exist in – to become part of his collection which can then be arranged by theme. The subjects of the photographs are similar, but the people in them will never correspond to each other in the way that a small photo album collection can. Both the lone image and the photo album collection have stories to tell, but one is much broader and relies more on visual appreciation, while the other can tell a more detailed story about a particular family or group of individuals at a particular time in history.

Suspended Conversations by Martha Langford

The author of Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums, Martha Langford, began the book as part of her dissertation research at McGill University in Montreal. The book is based around a collection of photo albums held at the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Langford’s argument is that conversation is a key part to experiencing photo albums; without a person who can activate the album, the album has lost its original purpose and meaning. As Langford states in the first chapter:

Voices must be heard for memories to be preserved, for the album to fulfill its function. Ironically, the very act of preservation – the entrusting of an album to a public museum – suspends its sustaining conversation, stripping the album of its social function and meaning (5).

Also in the introduction Langford points out that photographs in an album are of worth to researchers not for their recording of place names, but for portraiture, which in turn leads to interest in relationships (7). Through studying an album the viewer begins to see relationships. Viewers are “lobbed back and forth by the album’s cross-references and connections. Links between pictures, whether by place, date, costume, pose, composition, physical resemblance, or placement on the page, demand to be checked” (15). This sounds familiar and is how I’ve experienced the photo album I’m currently digitizing at work. There are clusters of photos from one event spread throughout two photo albums. Similar people recur as well as dates and locations. This indicates that the photo album, like memories, is a jumble, and not arranged as orderly as it may first appear. There are multiple gaps. In some cases multiple duplicates of uninteresting moments, and a lack of representation for a multitude of more important moments (6).

I’m looking forward to reading more from this book about photo albums and approaches for interpretation. There seem to be a few chapters that cover the photo album more broadly and a few that look quite specifically at albums from the McCord Museum.

For further reading on the photo album in the archive and how scholars might use them see the blog post Memory and Absences: The Challenges of Interpreting Scrapbooks and Photo Albums from Educating Women: Blog of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr College