The compilation of albums began almost upon the invention of photography and has continued to this day, migrating now into the realms of electronic and digital imagery. The private album, which includes, but is not limited to, the family album, is a hybrid of flexibility and conservatism--situational, syncretic and personal in its contents and organization. Interpretation of an album is correspondingly challenging, especially when the album has been separated from its compiler and placed in a public collection. / The McCord Museum of Canadian History has a substantial collection of private albums ranging in date from the 1860s to the 1960s. The collection has been assembled mainly from private donations as a reflection of Canadian social history. Aside from its breadth, the collection offers the researcher a degree of assurance that the albums represent the work of amateur compilers. Bringing this collection to light and raising the museum's consciousness of the value of these objects as albums have been important aspects of this study. / The primary focus, however, has been the discovery of an interpretational framework, a way of reconstituting the intentions and methods of the compiler. Albums have been interpreted as visual equivalents of analogous forms, such as journals or Family Bibles, but these categories fail to contain the full nature of compilatory expression which is often multiplistic, redundant, serpentine and obscure. The private album transferred to the public institution needs to be considered in the full context of its creation and presentation--the merging of visual and oral traditions. / A multidisciplinary review of the literature outlines the paradigms and metaphors that inflect our understanding of photographic albums as tools of communication and sources for artists. The function of the album as an aide-memoire for individual life history has long been recognized, but the detailed application of orality's condition and structure to the photographic album is here an original contribution to knowledge. The reconciliation of photography and orality expands our understanding of both and restores the heuristic conversation that brought the photographic album into being.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.42072 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Langford, Martha. |
| Contributors | Glen, Thomas L. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Art History.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001566544, proquestno: NQ30314, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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