The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak (Public History in Historical Perspective)

Product Description

In 1888, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company offered the first portable camera that allowed users to conveniently take photos, using leisure travel as a primary marketing feature to promote it. The combination of portability, ease of use, and mass advertising fed into a national trend of popular photography that drew on Americans’ increasing mobility and leisure time. The Kodak Company and the first generation of tourist photographers established new standards for personal archiving that amplified the individual’s role in authoring the national narrative. But not everyone had equal access to travel and tourism, and many members of the African American, Native American, and gay and lesbian communities used the camera to counter the racism, homophobia, and classism that shaped public spaces.
 
In this groundbreaking history, Tammy S. Gordon tells the story of the camera’s emerging centrality in leisure travel across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its role in “the mass production of memory,” a process in which users crafted a visual archive attesting to their experiences, values, and circumstances, setting the stage for the customizable visual culture of the digital age.
 

Review

“With a smooth, easy narrative style, Gordon weaves together fresh interpretive readings and solid archival work to create a stimulating study certain to attract an audience far broader than the usual circle of specialists, while still contributing substantially to the fields of public history and memory studies.”—Michael Frisch, author of
A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History
 
“Gordon draws on an extensive archive, both visual and textual, and effectively teases out the implications of the materials. An important contribution to studies of visual culture, tourism, and photography in the United States, and to American studies more broadly.”—Alison Landsberg, author of
Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
 

About the Author

TAMMY S. GORDON is professor of history at North Carolina State University and author of
The Spirit of 1976: Commerce, Community, and the Politics of Commemoration.