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...
University of California Press