From the Traditional Family Photo Album to Scrapbooking

by Bobbi Ann Johnson Holmes

         Traditional family photo albums were a place we put our photographs when they came back from the developer. We didn't cut our pictures into funny shapes or think about our photo book pages being acid free.  Then came the scrapbooking craze, and a new industry and hobby emerged. We started looking at our pictures differently, how they were handled and how the pictures were presented.
         I’ve always taken a lot of pictures, beginning when I was a child.  My mother also took a lot of photographs, and they were carefully stored away in boxes.  The only time we ever seemed to actually see her pictures, was immediately after they came back from the developer.  She always intended to get them into albums, yet that day never seemed to come.
         I vowed, that unlike my mother, I would faithfully place my photographs into albums the minute they came back from the developer, which would make them much more assessable for viewing.  And so I did, right up into my own children’s early childhood.
         The albums or scrapbooks that were popular back then were sticky backed cardboard pages, with peel back magnetic like clear sheet protectors.  I was very smug about my diligence, until one day, I heard about a new company called Creative Memories Scrapbooks, and a crafty concept for displaying your photographs, called scrapbooking.

Acid Free Paper for Photo Preservation
          With the scrapbooking craze came buzz words, like acid-free paper.  Scrapbooking was more than a craft, it was a mission in photo preservation, spreading the word on the evils of those old time albums. We were told that attaching our pictures to paper that was not acid-free would turn them yellow, cause premature aging and fading.
          I started looking though my albums, and sure enough, my treasured photos were turning yellow and fading.  My mother, on the other hand, had photos much older than mine, and in far better shape.  The reason?  Hers had never made it to an album.
          I began tearing apart my albums and boxing up my pictures, hoping to rescue them before they were damaged further. My ultimate goal was to re-album the pictures in healthier acid-free books.
          Scrapbooking was more than just placing photos in an acid-free book, it encouraged the use of stickers, interesting text and embellishments.  It also encouraged cropping photos or cutting them into creative shapes.  (More)