Graphic designer Jessica Helfand first noticed the scrapbook phenomenon when she was a young mother. But the design and lexicon she’d studied at Yale University were absent or employed in ways she found baffling. When she said so on her blog, the outraged scrapbook online community pounced. Her book “Scrapbooks: An American History” is part mea culpa and part social document. Claire Martin
Q: What did you say that made the scrapbooking bloggers so mad?
A: I was critical in the way I think a critic should be — more than I should have been. I learned there are incendiary discussions between scrapbookers and the graphic designers who refer to them as “crapbookers.”
Q: What happened?
A: Well, when people are (angry) on the Web, they let you know immediately. I take seriously my role as critic, but it bothered me that I upset these people. I started out as a lifelong paper and ephemera collector, and the daughter and wife of ephemera collectors. I knew that in scrapbooks, there was a body of work we hadn’t seen, and I wanted to talk about it in a way that made sense to people. If they were that excited about scrapbooking, they might be excited to learn they’re part of a larger history that they may not know.
Q: So you chose to write about vintage scrapbooks — the scrapbooks that predated the scrapbooking industry?
A: Yes, but I wanted eclectic scrapbooks, something that reflected the early 20th century — the economic depression, the war — made by people who weren’t trained visual designers but who made visual records of their lives.
Q: What’s the story behind the Colorado scrapbook in your book?
A: Stan Brakhage was an experimental filmmaker in the 1960s, a hippie filmmaker in Colorado who took packing tape and caught bugs, and got beautiful images using the camera as a form of glue. He was married to Jane, who made the scrapbooks. They had five children and no money. She’d go into his studio, pick up film scraps from the floor, and put them into a scrapbook. They’re beautiful. Yale got three of them, each the size of a Manhattan phone book.
Q: Have Americans always kept scrapbooks?
A: People have always found ways to document their family histories. The logic is, “I may be gone tomorrow, but by God, my life is documented on a page.” There’s something about the act of writing down what’s happened to you, pasting in a sugar wrapper from a significant meal at a restaurant, or a ticket from a play. It’s a way of stopping time.
Q: Or controlling time?
A: People who feel the world is spinning out of control might want to look at a picture of a kid when he was cute and young, and not 42 and out of a job.
Online.
