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. With In The New York Times Magazine: Scrapbooks and scrapbooking
SHARED MEMORIES:
The urge to have your creative talent for recording the past recognized in the here and now
This week in Consumed, a look at scrapbooking, and how scrapbookers’ creations (and their motives) have evolved.
Many of the images reproduced in “Scrapbooks: An American History,” by Jessica Helfand, date back 50, 80, even 100 years. Reproduced in color and spread across wide pages, they are treated as worthy examples of creativity. The anonymous scrapbook creators could hardly have imagined such a fate for their work. Whatever audience they had in mind, it surely did not include a design critic ruminating over this “evocative” and “largely overlooked class of artifact.”
In the 21st century, of course, scrapbooking is a multibillion-dollar affair, with specialty publications and businesses serving a huge market of self-documentarians. By and large, their work has little aesthetic resemblance to what Helfand has compiled. And while contemporary “scrappers” may not be thinking about future historians, a good number are thinking about an audience — and it isn’t just the grandkids. …
Read the column in the September 14, 2008, issue if The New York Times Magazine, or here.
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Reader Comments
After five decades of family gatherings, my cousin and I became obsessed with how little we and our extend relatives knew about our family’s history or even who was who. Both of us fifty-plus year old males embarked on a collaborative effort to document through scrapbooking. We relied on his scavenging diligence to collect and my creativity and organization to apply. We quickly learned that if we truely wanted to share our discoveries not just with each other but to all, present and future, then we had to put it on the internet. Neither of us are from the computer savvy generation, so we hired some help Our project became a sort of quasi family website with a scapbooking twist, complete with biographies, family events (historic and current), a fandom page and a blog. Thankfully, many family members were infected with our enthusiasm once they saw the progress. It’s amazing how much help you will receive if you enter some inaccurate data about someone’s relatives! Scapbooking is a great craft/art-form, but if sharing your efforts your motive then take the super highway.