Catherine D. Yates
One example of the power of material culture can be found in the recreation of families’ photographic records in Soviet Central Asia. The touching up of photographs allowed families, dismantled during purges, deportations, or forced labor, to reunite on the page. “In these portraits the photorealist artists ‘corrected’ the originals, straightening crooked hair bows, adjusting collars and adding brooches to drab Soviet clothing or adding patterns to monotone dresses. You could have a portrait with your beloved but absent father who was a victim of the purges and whom you had never seen.”4 Objects are relics, they mirror our visions. Imagining and recording memories unites us on the page. The chaos and impermanence of conflict clears a path towards resolution.
The Romanov family photo albums, archived at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, provide a counterexample. The albums capture, in casual snapshots, the mundane daily intimacies of Tsar Nicholas II and his family before they were murdered by Bolshevik forces in July 1918. These carefree snapshots taken by the Tsar and his wife, and by a family friend and confidant, with a Brownie Kodak camera, capture typical family activities. We see them hunting for mushrooms, knitting on a yacht, sledding, playing tennis, at picnics and dinner parties, as well as performing the duties of a ruling family, with no hint of what might come.
In contrast, the scrapbooks of artist Jane Wodening and her husband, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, record portraits of life in the mountain town of Rollinsville, Colorado from 1958 to 1967. In the carefully cut-and-pasted volume of cultural ephemera a canto to a simpler time is registered: typewritten love letters, postcards, photographs of their children reading and playing outdoors. Wodening gives a bottle to her baby sitting in a lawn chair in a turn-of-the-century wood cabin. The scrapbook lays out a story, told through a cut-up of words and printed images, encoded in the recognizable but also self-secret language of the New York School. We organize our lives in meaningful arrangements whenever we choose to pin up a picture.
Nancy Rolfe’s scrapbook (1921-1933), part of the James Weldon Johnson archives at the Beinecke Library, is made up of ephemera corresponding to her time at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College between 1921 and 1933. The scrapbook contains photographs, announcements, and correspondence, some related to her siblings Daniel Thomas Rolfe and Carrie R. Rolfe. All this is seemingly ordinary, perhaps even unremarkable, and yet the details of Rolfe’s experiences have immediate redemptive power in that they reveal a segregated reality—a world of intimacies and plans. Within these pages I saw another side of Black American Jim Crow South college life. Rolfe’s scrapbook documents her classes and social life at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. Familiar references include Easter table-setting cards, birthday cards, and invitations to gatherings. But there are also references to events and locations, such as concerts and brunches, that were unfamiliar to me.
Since scrapbooks are constructed after the fact, they collect information in a different way than a single photograph or piece of memorabilia. The organization of the material in the scrapbooks generates a story different from the spoken or written story. Organization and orchestration are what bring stories to life. We admire a story, and we believe it, because of its emotionality, but perhaps the real impact lies in what a scrapbook can tell us. It is the suggestions and the layering or materials that make the characters meaningful.
Scrapbooks contain more than images and writing. Objects contained within a scrapbook make their own statements. Touching objects that are intentionally collected gives us a better understanding of the story we are reading. A scrapbook does what a regular book cannot do. It gives us an object to explore with our hands, a step into the tangible, beyond interpreting words. When building a class scrapbook, we build a world of personal values. Giving objects value by deliberating about them and choosing them for a scrapbook makes it so that scrapbooks build connections to the reader and writer through their materiality. Materiality is an antidote to social media. While building this scrapbook, we will simultaneously build relationships with things we experience through all our senses.
The goal of creating a scrapbook for this unit includes building an audience for it. Even though the scrapbook is not meant for families, the process should look towards the larger community as an audience. The point of reading scrapbooks is to build understanding and empathy, the basis for community. Nothing builds community like authenticity and effort. A scrapbook represents all of these values in a simple form which can be produced in the classroom without too many materials, and without spending too much money. The point of reading such books is to become part of the story they hold on to. These books are interactive; they are both personal and private, as they activate our memory and remind us of what we are made of, how we came to be. Scrapbooks create meaning and connection.
Scrapbooks can be thought of as a working rough draft. The scrapbook is a composition. The order of things in a scrapbook, the choice of what is accepted onto the pages of the scrapbook, and what is rejected from the pages of the scrapbook, can serve as an example of how we compose narrative fiction and nonfiction. With each photograph or with each piece of memorabilia, we are brought into conversation with the authors of the scrapbook in a way that is more hands-on than the way we interact with fiction or non-fictional texts. A scrapbook models the serendipity that is the basis of most writing, a basis which is often not spoken of. Just as the sequence of pages in a scrapbook are composed by a partial but invisible party, creative writing offers sequences that come together similarly. Writing is a collection of ordinary elements brought together to create something new and unpredictable.
Scrapbooks are also visual catalogues. Their power is dependent not so much on description and collection, but on intentional organization or editing. Teaching creative writing by introducing students to skills for how to read a scrapbook as a material object has the potential to lead to stronger writing. This is because strong writing comes from the better understanding of the details.
Presenting students with objects such as the Romanov Family albums and Nancy Rolfe’s scrapbooks, which we can visit and study at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, is the basis for showing how a story can be seen as a collection of materials. Educators don’t need to consult these specific objects, of course, but can seek out other resources at cultural heritage institutions in their communities. Handling objects is a universal experience. It is something we are taught from the beginning. How do we hold a glass, how do we hold a shovel? Holding books and scrapbooks, talking about them, and learning from them, will build strong academic relationships in the present. These relationships and findings about ourselves are new—this is how we continue to learn as artists and students, by meeting stories as objects.
