Begin with an object: a book, kept by Althea Beatrice Moore, an African American student at the University of Iowa, from 1924 to 1928. The item’s archival catalog entry describes it with various terms: scrapbook, address book, and autograph album. It bears the university’s seal on its cover: an eagle grasping a laurel and a bow in its talons, an arrow in its beak; around the eagle, the university’s name and founding date.
Page by page, this album presents a curated record of Moore’s college experience. On preprinted forms friends signed their names, each with their address and a “toast.” Moore listed athletic contests, “theatres and entertainments,” and “social functions” on similar forms, which gave her space to record where and when the entertainment was, with whom she went, and a few notes about her experience. A concert put on by the Midnight Ramblers Jazz Orchestra was “wonderful. All the players really knew music and gave it to us. Men were sharp.” Moore filled blue and black pages with photographs, programs, invitations, greeting cards, and newspaper clippings. One page is taken up by a collage: Madison Avenue phrases cut from magazine pages (“You can’t beat it”; “For all needs”; “Delightful and so inexpensive”; and “The results will convince you”) surround a magazine photo of an African American couple, clinched in a kiss.
In her album, Moore expresses and records herself. She mediates herself through paper forms, through the set expectations they communicate that college is a whirl of athletic games, social events, and friends. She grounds her identity in a formal institutional affiliation and in the social connections that blossomed in that context. One page in particular suggests how the album mediates the personal, the institutional, and the social: on the first of a series of photograph pages, Moore has constructed the figure of an “I” from six small portraits of herself and her friends. In Moore’s “I,” she and her friends are the building blocks of the “I” of her institution, the University of Iowa. I have a place here. I am Iowa.
As a material text, Althea Beatrice Moore’s album expresses the tensions and creative possibilities that have defined the album as a *genre from the *Renaissance to the present in the West. Albums have long been used to communicate and reinforce social order, rank, and cultural expectations for what it means to be a literate, educated person. They have also been venues for the expression of individual and corporate identity. As a result, albums are prime sites for exploring how individual experience and self-fashioning happen with and against cultural norms and expectations.
In ancient Rome, an “album” was a white-painted wooden board (albus meaning white in Latin), posted outside official locations, such as the Roman Senate, to publish the official lists of senators. Edicts were officially published on alba. Here the official aspect of the album predominated: it was a tool for ordering and ranking society and communicating the dictates of power.
In sixteenth-century Europe, German-speaking students, among others, revived the album as the album amicorum, or album of friends. It took *codex form, with written, drawn, printed, and collaged elements. These books—in which individuals (usually men) collected signatures, drawings, scraps of verse, printed woodcuts cut out and personalized with coats of arms and other marks of personal identity—were popular with students, travelers, scholars, and physicians. Alba amicorum began as makeshift affairs, but soon press professionals got in on the game. Binders neatly interleaved emblem books with blank pages for album entries, and *publishers, such as the Frankfurt bookseller Sigmund Feyerabend (1528–91), printed books with purpose-made woodcuts and forms for including all the requisite marks of personal esteem and association. Artists produced drawings and watercolor paintings for bespoke albums. The “album verse” became a byword for canned couplets.
Like Moore’s album, the album amicorum displayed the self—a person’s journey through life, collecting associates and experiences. It was a semipublic record, in that album keepers expected associates to peruse the book and note the company they would enter in signing. It reflected and reinforced the distribution of power in society, as individuals signed the book in an order that reflected social status (kings in the front, artisans at the back) and signers perused each other’s books for clues to their relative places in the world. It was a memory device, to be returned to in later life to muse over past friendships and travels.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the album gathered women as keepers and contributors. Articles in nineteenth-century general-interest and women’s magazines recommend the keeping, care, and decoration of friendship albums, and, by the end of the century, photograph albums. In the 1820s, the Saturday Evening Post printed album verses, with themes of death, friendship, the contrast between one’s outer gaiety and inner sadness, and the swift passage of youth. (A sample from 1825: “But ah! Just as its rich array / The opening bud display’d / Some rude hand snatch’d the flower away, / And left the Rose-bush, no more gay, / To droop its withering head.”) Album keeping trended in and out of fashion: Harper’s Bazaar, in 1883, lamented that the kids these days had abandoned it. The magazine urged readers to keep original, clever albums, rather than fall prey to the temptation to water the Saturday Evening Post’s rose bushes.
In the nineteenth century, albums were a natural site for preserving photographs, given the ways in which they had long captured memory and identity. Women tended their photograph albums as domestic furniture, encasing them in velvet slipcovers embroidered with their monogram. Albums available for purchase might be bound in fine, gilded leather, decorated with curlicues and clasps, with pages precut for round and square portraits. Both exterior and interior of the album displayed the keeper’s place within an extended world of family, friends, and acquaintances. Such albums might, as Moore’s does, incorporate text as memories, quotes, and lists of friends, as well as labels for the photographs. The boundary between “scrapbook” and “album” is fuzzy (witness the multiple archival tags applied to Moore’s book), but add social life’s paper ephemera—dance and concert programs, menus, visiting cards, and magazine pages—and you have an album that could also be called a scrapbook, the making of which still tends to be the province of women. Through handwork and careful consumption of ready-made goods, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters have long kept their families’ memories and conserved and promoted their families’ places in the world.
The word album continued to spread as a label for various media genres, often, but not always, retaining its list-like character, its sense of miscellany, and its connections with sentimental domesticity. Late nineteenth-century sheet music publishers sold collections of short, sweet musical vignettes, appropriate for gifting, such as the Little Folks’ Album of Music (1882). In the early twentieth century, with the commercialization of recorded sound, record companies broke longer pieces of music (such as the movements of a symphony) across multiple records (each three to five minutes per side) and packaged them as a boxed collection, to be displayed on the shelf like a photograph album. Perhaps because these first music albums were coherent, longer works, the record album evolved as a less miscellaneous, more story-like genre in the mid-twentieth century, with some artists insisting that each album trace a narrative.
For many, memory keeping, and the performance of social identity that it entails, began shifting to the online realm in the 1990s, first through photo-sharing sites and then through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. These services unite the functions of the album amicorum and the photograph album: Facebook, famously, emerged from a university milieu, like Moore’s album and the *early modern German album amicorum. The social network photograph album is a collaborative performance distributed across space and years, as relatives and friends see, share, and remember photographs of significant events in their lives: births, weddings, trips, deaths. The experience is organized and reorganized by the creators themselves and by the hosting company’s programmers as they tweak how their algorithms display information.
As ever, albums oscillate between official, printed, or preprogrammed forms and an individuality achieved through personalization of those forms. In the digital era, tensions between originality and individuality and the prepackaged formulas of social expression (emojis, “like” buttons) are as deeply felt as they were in the early modern period. As albums have moved online, they have been shaped by tensions between privacy and publicity; permanence and evanescence; and corporate versus personal control of information. In the online realm, the relative publicity or privacy of one’s comments, memories, and photos depends on decisions made by companies and governments to use, sell, and regulate personal data. Albums are seemingly everywhere, visual and textual records to be searched and recalled, many years hence. Yet albums are also nowhere, scrolling by, fragmenting, and disappearing, as successive technological waves barrel on, as governments and companies delete content, as users abandon outdated social networks.
Return for one last look at Althea Beatrice Moore’s collegiate album. Though her photographic I opens the pages of snapshots, it is not the first page of the album. The printed frontispiece depicts vignettes from college life: a white man carries a briefcase, contemplates a letter, and plays football. A white woman casts her gaze down toward a shelf of textbooks. Moore did not tear this page out; she could have. But she did counterbalance this image with her own. Moore’s album powerfully reminds us of the creativity and play in human identity making, and the ways in which the forms of social life channel, constrain, and distort that creativity.
Elizabeth Yale
See also art of memory; cameras; digitization; letters; platforms; public sphere; social media