The Family Album

The inheritance of the family photographic album often arrives with tragic news of the loss of a family member.

I have always been aware that the album existed, I have always understood that whom lays within the album bares relation to myself through family history, however. It was the loss of my grandmother in 2011 when I first saw my family’s photographic album. For me the family album raised questions regarding identity.

The purpose of the photographic album was the encouragement of taking and collecting photographs, ‘the first album was produced in France, but they were available in Britain as early as the summer of 1861’ (Shrimpton, 2011, p.109). The relationship between photographic prints and displaying them in the new album became a popular fashion in the early 1860’s. The album was designed to look like the family’s traditional bible. It is believed by Jayne Shrimpton in her publication How to get the most from Family Pictures, (2011) that the collection of family photography in an album could also replace the custom of recording births, deaths and marriages in the family bible. The family who owned the album would then start to write annotations of names and dates describing each image.

The arrangement of each photograph inside the album may appear random, but if we carefully look at layout and question it, we can slowly understand sometimes the significant clues. Usually the first image of the album would be the original owner or the first member of the family who created it, the first album holder. However, ‘a family album holds a profusion – a confusion – of pleasure and pain, as pictures old and new offer themselves up with deceptive innocence. Family collections are never just memories. Their disconnected points offer glimpses of many possible pasts’ (Spence and Holland, 1991, p.1). Album holders also captured a structured understanding of their own family identity through the use of descriptive texts often written on the backs or around individual photographs captured within the album itself. From this the method of using descriptive text in the album shows an insightful knowledge regarding the individual identities of each family member. ‘Family photographs are supposed to show not so much that we were once there, as how we once were’ (Spence and Holland, 1991, p.18).

A selection of photographs from my family album

References:

Shrimpton, J. (2011). How to get the most from family pictures. London: Society of Genealogists Enterprises.

Spence, J. and Holland, P. (1991). Family snaps. London: Virago.