PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS: Snapshot Chronicles
Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album Reed College, Portland, Oregon Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2006
Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album
Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
2006
Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Princeton Architectural Press, New York
2006
The beauty of collections, the gathering of details, the fragments of past lives lived. All these things touch us deeply and became the focus of this book’s design. It is a collection of collections, and mirrors the phenomenal rise of the snapshot in America.
Stephanie Snyder, Director of the Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, was interested in organizing an exhibition of Barbara Levine’s extraordinary collection of early American photo albums. A catalogue was proposed to accompany the show, but Reed’s budget didn’t afford the substantial book that everyone wanted.
When I was approached to design Snapshot Chronicles, I had been collecting vintage photo albums for some time, and had been using selections from their pages in other projects. So it took no time to feel attuned to the material.
Once I became part of the project, I too yearned for a larger, more complete book. I contacted Princeton Architectural Press, who had recently published some successful books featuring vernacular photography, to see if they might be interested in partnering with Reed. They agreed, and so we started planning for the major project we all had dreamed of.
At an early stage of the design process, I had access to Levine’s albums and began scanning pages and cropping details. I found interest in details that made the collection and time period unique — hats, spoked wheels, damaged photos, handwriting. I enjoyed the subtle variations and commonalities among the the thousands of pictures collected among the pages. I arranged to have every page scanned and hunted for groupings that would work well in the book. In the final book, fifteen different groups of details are featured.
Stephanie Snyder, Director of the Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, was interested in organizing an exhibition of Barbara Levine’s extraordinary collection of early American photo albums. A catalogue was proposed to accompany the show, but Reed’s budget didn’t afford the substantial book that everyone wanted.
When I was approached to design Snapshot Chronicles, I had been collecting vintage photo albums for some time, and had been using selections from their pages in other projects. So it took no time to feel attuned to the material.
Once I became part of the project, I too yearned for a larger, more complete book. I contacted Princeton Architectural Press, who had recently published some successful books featuring vernacular photography, to see if they might be interested in partnering with Reed. They agreed, and so we started planning for the major project we all had dreamed of.
At an early stage of the design process, I had access to Levine’s albums and began scanning pages and cropping details. I found interest in details that made the collection and time period unique — hats, spoked wheels, damaged photos, handwriting. I enjoyed the subtle variations and commonalities among the the thousands of pictures collected among the pages. I arranged to have every page scanned and hunted for groupings that would work well in the book. In the final book, fifteen different groups of details are featured.
