Scrapbooking Cont'd

Reader Eric Akawie writes in response to the item below:

I think another, somewhat unconscious motive behind Scrapbooking is the deprecation of the physical status of photographs. I remember as a child, photographs were absolutely sacred — we never threw away or cut up a photo, no matter how bad it was. But now, with photos printed at home, and so cheap individually, throwing photographs away is not a big deal (although I always feel a pang and sense my mother's disapproving glare.)

Scrapbooking returns that sense of specialness to the photos included, and with the amount of work (and money!) that goes into an individual page, acts as a bulwark against the photos being discarded during some cleaning/purging/simplifying binge.

The scrapbooking phenomenon reminds me of an observation made by Rose Wilder Lane in The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework, published in 1963. Lane, an important mid-century libertarian writer, is best known as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House books she edited. Her needlework book combines some how-to advice with what would now be called feminist cultural studies. Her chapter on quilting emphasizes that "women created this rich needlework art who had not a penny to spend or a half-inch bit of cloth to waste." By contrast, the following chapter, on appliqué, highlights Hawaiian quilts which, like scrapbooking, were the product not of poverty but of unprecedented abundance: islanders with a kind climate and ample food who suddenly had access to steel pins and needles and mass-produced bolts of cloth. "You'd know that [Hawaiian appliqué] is up to date and then some, if you knew only one thing about it: it wastes cloth, lavishly," wrote Lane. "It wastes new cloth." When necessity ceases to be the mother of invention, as with patchwork quilts, the drive to create develops arts for their own sake.

Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 02, 2006