Thoughts on scrapbooking
It recently occurred to me that my mother might’ve been a scrapbooker, maybe even one of the first in Malaysia. Except in those days (the 50s and 60s), it wasn’t known as scrapbooking, at least not in this part of the world, and there weren’t all the fancy scrapbook albums, accessories and supplies. Instead, there were just photo albums.
My sister, brother and I each have our own baby albums. These are simple books with black pages, hard board covers with designs, and photo corners used to hold the photos in place. The photo corners in my baby album are plastic and still in good condition, while the ones in my brother’s album are paper, some of them fraying. I think my sister’s album has paper photo corners, too, but I don’t have it on hand to check; she took hers with her after she married.
My brother’s baby album
Mine was a bit more ornate; but it was also four years later
Further back than my sister’s baby album, there is also my parents’ wedding photo album. Even further back than that are photo albums commemorating the 25th anniversary of the family’s Chinese medicine shop, as well as the opening of the family’s second Chinese medicine shop. In addition to photographs, the anniversary albums also had newspaper clippings of congratulatory messages advertised by business associates. Many of the photo corners in these albums have lost their adhesiveness so flipping through the pages is often an exercise in caution not to let a photo slip from its original page.
Some of the congratulatory messages in the
shop’s 25th anniversary “scrapbook”
All our albums also feature identical family portraits taken every year on, or around, our parents’ wedding anniversary. The portraits were taken at professional photo studios, but not during regular business hours. Since both our parents worked and couldn’t take time off for the sessions, we had to do it after business hours. Good thing the various photo studios were owned by my father’s good friends who agreed to do the photography in the evenings. Every year, we would put on our best clothes (chosen by mother in our younger days) and troop into the studio for the portraits. Each annual set would feature one of the whole family, a second of our parents, and a third of just us kids. The early portraits were full-length shots; these changed to half-body shots beginning from the year my sister and brother decided they didn’t want to wear shoes and asked that the slippers not be shown in the photos.
In addition to our baby albums, we also have other photo albums through our growing years. The designs of each successive album give an indication of the changing tastes and times. From the simple books of black pages and photo corners, we moved on to fancier self-adhesive albums with stiffer board-like sticky pages, each overlaid with a film cover the same size as the page. To mount the photos, the film is lifted off the page, the photos put in place and the film repositioned over them. The film can be lifted off again and again; unfortunately, over the years, the sticky pages lost the self-adhesiveness so that the photos are no longer held firmly in place.
From these self-adhesive photo albums, we moved onto photo albums with pockets. Those were the last complete albums that required time spent selecting photos to include in each album. Latter albums were throwaway albums that came back with photos sent for developing, each sufficient to display either 24 or 36 pictures, depending on the size of the film roll used. Once the photos went into such albums, they stayed there, and the albums accumulated into stacks over time, the intention to sort and refile them into bigger, more permanent albums, diminishing with each passing year.
And then, there were no more albums. At least not for me, as I’ve moved on to taking digital photographs which do not require physical albums to file them.
And now, in my mother’s footsteps, I am ready to become a scrapbooker. A digital scrapbooker.
For a long time, I thought scrapbooking was a forward looking hobby, good for storing memories for future generations. In fact, that was what my mother did for us, store our baby and childhood memories for us to look back in later years. That’s what a lot of current scrapbooking examples show, too (including my friend Karenika’s excellent site). But recently, I realised scrapbooking can be used to look back, too; it’s a form of memoir. And I have lots of old family photos to organise into scrapbooks; all the various photo albums mentioned earlier are with me, and I’m sort of the family historian.
However, I don’t really like physical scrapbooking – the physical pages and the pictures will deteriorate over time, and there can only be one copy which will be difficult to share with the rest of the family (my sister, brother, as well as our cousins). So what’s the alternative?
Digital scrapbooking. It will be paperless (I will be doing my part in not killing trees for my hobby), and will help to preserve old photographs. It will also be easy to share, especially online – once a scrapbook is ready and uploaded online, I just need to send an email to family members with email access.
In my own way, I have dabbled with digital scrapbooking, but in a very simple, almost primitive way. During my early website days, I’d created a mini site celebrating the family’s Chinese medicine shop, and scanned the two anniversary photo albums to put on that site. A few years later, I discovered software to create online photo galleries and have set up an online photo site which is home to various photo albums, including one for old family photos that I put up for my cousins after an older cousin passed on last year.
All these efforts to date are just digital photo albums, the way my mother’s “scrapbooks” of our baby photos are just photo albums, but they have been leading me to this moment. Mother is no longer able to further her skills to make actual scrapbooks, but I will take over and plan to learn digital scrapbooking skills to help me create digital memories of our family history for our future generations.
Now, where to begin?
