Review: The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak, by Tammy S. Gordon

Abstract

In the 1990s, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen found that 91 percent of Americans had “looked at photographs with family or friends” and that 83 percent had “taken photographs or videos to preserve memories” over the course of the previous year.1 Certainly, those numbers would be even higher today. In her book, The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak, public historian Tammy S. Gordon takes the reader back to Americans’ first access to personal cameras and tells the important story of how amateur photography became so deeply intertwined with individual and community identity making and preservation in the period before World War II.Gordon begins by describing the European tradition of the Grand Tour, in which elite white men would take lengthy trips across the continent and hire painters to memorialize their images surrounded by the history that they encountered on their travels. Elite American travelers also participated in these rituals, and by 1870, might hire a professional photographer, rather than a painter, to record their experiences. George Eastman’s invention, the portable Kodak camera, became widely available in the 1890s and enabled tourists to become photographers themselves for the first time. For middle- and working-class Americans, who often had a “suspicion of leisure,” amateur travel photography encouraged them to see themselves as productive tourists, a role more comfortable to them (19).Kodak engaged early on in aggressive marketing strategies which, by 1900, led the company to have the nation’s largest advertising expenditures. “The World is Mine, I Own a Kodak,” the headline of a 1912 advertisement, showcased how Kodak continued the white American “tradition of conflating tourism with power,” and often imperialism specifically (28). Imperialism was sometimes entwined with white masculinity; one 1914 advertisement featured the image of a young white man and invoked the roles of “[s]urveyor, hunter, tourist, explorer” (37). White women appeared in many Kodak advertisements during this period as well with a consistent message that emphasized their freedom and competence, not surprising in the era immediately surrounding the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Kodak imagined its consumer, whether male or female, exclusively as white; in one archival collection of 549 Kodak advertisements, there are none that “pictured African Americans as camera users” (65).Armed with cameras, white Americans became often at best a nuisance, at worst a menace, to the people whose lives they sought to capture on film. Unlike paintings, however, photography gave photographic subjects the opportunity to resist the vision of the photographer. In 1904, for example, Richard Ross Whiting photographed a group of Native Americans at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis. In one photograph, a group of Native American men appeared on horseback. At least four of them held up small mirrors and one man turned his face away from the camera and covered it with his hand and arm. Whiting labeled the photograph, “Indians on Pike at World’s Fair trying to prevent picture being made by reflecting sunlight from small mirrors into camera.”2Much of Gordon’s focus in The Mass Production of Memory is on how historically excluded groups embraced photography and photographed their subjects in ways that emphasized, in the words of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, “photographic sovereignty,” which Gordon explains as the “ability to maintain control over one’s image and use visual media for self-actualization and self-determination” (54). As Gordon writes, “Photos from the 1920s and 1930s—at least the ones that made their way into the archives—include subjects engaged in disrupting existing power dynamics and stereotypes: women wearing men’s wear and men wearing women’s wear; African Americans claiming public spaces; Native Americans using modern technology” (92).For African Americans, automobility and cameras created opportunities to preserve their own photographic histories, mainly in three categories: photographs of people at beaches, photographs of people with cars, and photographs of people’s friends and family on vacation. The first two categories also indicated the class status of the photographers and their subjects: access to beaches was the purview of wealthier African Americans, who created Black resort areas; segregation of public beaches left other African Americans often with access only to “remote, polluted, and unsafe swimming areas” (98). Similarly, the photos of African Americans with cars also revealed men and women who had achieved a level of financial success during the interwar years. The third category, photographs of family and friends on vacation, included images taken by men and women on a wider range of the economic spectrum, but who, like all African Americans, had much less safe access to public spaces than white Americans and who, as a result, focused their lenses less on “ruins, architecture, and landscape, as well as ‘foreign’ people” (101). When African Americans did photograph people in other nations, as Gordon’s example of Lida Broner shows, they did so with considerably more respect than whites showed to their subjects. African American photographers used the camera to record “their own communities, families, and friends,” in order to “construct and control their histories and memories” (101).Amateur photography by members of the LGBTQ community also emerged during this period. Members of the LGBTQ community faced challenges related to the technology of the era: “most amateur photos had to be taken outside, in the full light of day” and “relatives often destroyed” what photographic evidence may have existed of relationships they disapproved of (104). Gordon uses the photo albums of well-known and lesser-known Americans—Ella Liscombe, Pauli Murray, Gertrude Stein—to show how they challenged societal expectations around gender and sexuality with photography.The Mass Production of Memory is a fascinating contribution to the field of public history, material culture, and visual culture studies. Gordon traces the emergence and growth of amateur photography in the United States and the ways in which it not only reinforced imperialist white supremacist hetero-normative capitalist patriarchy but also opened up avenues, not only for resistance to it, but the ability to archive and pass down evidence of that resistance through photographs. The portable camera was, as Gordon notes, unusual in being a mass-produced consumer good that enabled its owners to become producers themselves, in this case, of photographs. While the inventors and makers of consumer goods always lose the ability to control the meanings they ascribe to their products when they enter the marketplace, this loss of control was significantly amplified in the case of the camera because its users produced images that documented their understanding of the world around them. Understanding better the emergence of amateur photography between the 1880s and the 1930s will aid anyone with photographs from this period in personal or public collections to interpret the possibilities and limitations the photographers who took these pictures faced and the meanings that we can ascribe to these images today.