Editors: Katarzyna Adamska, Monika Michałowicz, Katarzyna Bojarska



A photo album should not be merely looked at. It engages the whole body. Various forms of photo album demand different movements – leaning in, bringing it close to the eyes, gently flicking the tissue paper – from the start it is as if the album moves us and already at this stage one enters into a relationship with it. The photographs in the album are not mere illustrations, and its reading is not a linear process. The album encourages a complex interaction, opens up space for the imagination and finds its very particular place in memory. We know we are dealing with an album by what we do with it and what it does to us. This is why it is easier to think of the diversity and specificity of albums in terms of practices rather than documents or works.

Albums shouldn’t be expected to be equal to artworks in terms of uniqueness or coherence. It is the reflection on what is repetitive, banal or unfinished in them that directs attention to the specificity of album practices. As Matthias Bickenbach observes, 19th century albums, filled with seemingly random collections of photographs of family, acquaintances and celebrities of the time, may point to important features of modern paradigms of commemoration. In contrast, many 20th century albums give the impression of recording an individual experience, although, when seen together with others created in similar circumstances, they reveal conventions – surprisingly so in some cases, as for example the albums of soldiers.

Authorship, so crucial in the case of artworks, is often undefined or impossible to establish for albums. In revisiting the question of authorship, the idea is not only to value the often invisible labour of female album makers on an equal footing with photographers, but to conceptualise the question of authorship and its importance for what albums do in a different way. What to call this role: maker or keeper? Is the album made or kept, is one the creator or the owner? Or perhaps rather a participant – as suggested by albums such as Photographs of Polish Peasants (1993) or And I Still See Their Faces (1996), whose publication was preceded by public calls for pictures and exhibitions, and whose function was not only to disseminate images in which the community could recognise itself, but also that newly found souvenirs could be seen to belonging to a collective imagination, and to be understood through it.

How albums work cannot be explained in the framework of representation. As Iwona Kurz has noted, in albums, photography “oscillates between the status of document and souvenir, between being an image and being an object.” The image gains the status of a document under a specialised gaze, trained to treat the medium as transparent. Its antithesis is the practice of looking at family photographs, where even an empty album can support processes of remembering, as demonstrated by Philiswa Lila, whose family album, with no photographs left and bearing the traces of many people's touch, remained – perhaps even all the more – a source of bonding. In order to appreciate the importance of materiality, instead of looking, one might think of interacting with the prints, of gestures that enable relationships. Such a perspective allows us to see the simultaneity of image and object, and to treat albums not so much as a medium but as a form of photographic presence.

It is through the selection, juxtaposition, and editing of images that an album can establish similarities, coherence, creating a canon and a utopia, of art for example, as Georges Didi-Huberman argues. One might venture to say that the history of art happens in albums. Their construction, however, is not, after all, ‘purely’ visual; it is also linked to its shape (similar to a book), locating the photographs within space, and activating a processes of reading and remembering inherent to the paper-based paradigm of knowledge. At a moment of transformation of this paradigm, when, especially through photo albums, what resists digitisation becomes visible, there is an opportunity to rethink the visual practices associated with it.

In this issue of “View” we would like to offer a joint reflection on photo albums – an exchange of tools and toolboxes to conceptualise them – and to sketch a map of new concepts. We are interested in, among other things:

  • new research perspectives and conceptualisations
  • the importance of the materiality of photography for memory
  • the perspective of the anthropology of reading on albums
  • analysis of, and methodological reflection on, particular albums
  • practices of making and using albums, incl. family, school, army, police, medical
  • women’s albums, children’s albums
  • the questionable status of albums as historical sources
  • albums as performative objects: potentialities and limitations to such approachs; curatorial, research and museological experience in oral history practice
  • artistic practices framing the workings of albums



This issue is being conceived in collaboration with the Museum of Warsaw



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