Until a few weeks ago, I thought that the 'photo album' was a thing of the past. The real physical one, anyway. In my day-to-day life I have plenty of shared photo albums on my phone, but it has been a long time since I looked at a truly hand-assembled collection of images, and I’d forgotten – or perhaps never really understood – their power.
What changed my mind? Let me set the scene. It was only minutes after I’d arrived at my family home with my girlfriend. It was her first visit to my childhood home and my parents
Suddenly, things took a turn. My mother shared a meaningful glance with my father, who left the room – weird enough – before returning brandishing a wedge of card pages totaling some four inches thick, bound in chunky hardback. It was a family photo album.
I was already uneasy. This is a rare enough social situation, and I was already feeling phrases like “Tell us about the time you two first met…” take on the tone of interrogation.
The presence of a photo album, however, pushed that discomfort to extreme horror as I anticipated the near-inevitable mortification contained within. Could my relationship survive? Was this their plan?
A few minutes later, though, we were paging through dad’s photos – caught on his Pentax SLR, for the most part – from a single family holiday from the late 1990s. Suddenly my only worries were how infrequently I changed my Weezer t-shirt back then. It started to seem like a nice way for my parents and my girlfriend to bond – and I could feel my cringe gland (science fact: this isn’t a thing) start to relax.
It helped that the photos revealed I wasn’t quite the physical wreck I remember myself being at that age. Rather than running for the door, my girlfriend seemed to delight in the pictures and the stories they triggered.
As we continued, I started to truly admire the amount of effort my dad put into the creation of this album. This single album represented just two weeks of my family’s life (albeit significant ones – the first time I’d been on a plane, and the first time I’d travelled outside Europe). Each page had captions and all the photo prints seemed well preserved given their age.
It was my father who got me interested in photography in the first place, and his care for it had clearly continued into the manual art of assembling the album. I had started to appreciate it was something of a lost art, somewhere between scrapbooking and publishing.
A week or two later and I found myself helping my girlfriend's mother get a photo album from the cupboard at her family home.
This time, though, there were no nerves – at least on my girlfriend's side! Perhaps it's her natural confidence, perhaps the fact she has been writing about herself in major publications for years, or perhaps it was the confidence inspired by seeing photos of me as a youth (it's probably the second one), but in any case we devoured an album of yellowing but charming images from many years before my trip to Boston and New York.
Now I will say that we did have to do a bit of re-assembling. It's impressive that the protective film seemed to have survived, but after a few decades it looked like time to fix things down with the best glue for scrapbooking.
My main takeaway, though, was just how nice the tactile experience of turning the pages of a physical photo album was. Seeing the captions. Talking it through with relatives.
I'd been scared of them and, I realise, I don't make them at all. Unless it's work, I tend to take photos with my phone, and I either just dump photos into albums myself or – more and more – trust the phone's AI to handle that for me.
That's a tragedy. It is, still, relatively joyless, in my view, and without love. Sorry Gen Z, a few emoji don't cut it!
Flicking and swiping on a screen with a narrower viewing angle (whatever the manufacturer claims), leaving finger smears, or grinding through an app on your TV will never be quite the same, or demand the same mix of skills.
Photography should, sometimes, be tactile, and I'd urge you to remember that – if you take photos to document your life – remember to share it. IT's part of the wider experience and, years later, it will be worth it.
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See how to make the best photo albums, and check out the best glue for scrapbooking. You can, of course, try the best photobook services. (or the best photobooks in the UK).
If you're feeling there is a commercial market, or a charity, why not try something like the Covid Street project – successfully published using Amazon's tools.
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