Today, the photo album is something we take for granted, and “scrapbooking” is a billion-dollar industry with its own television network. It was not always so. Before the camera, ordinary families had little more than the family Bible, a portrait of Grandpa, and a drawer full of documents. Then Eastman Kodak introduced the Brownie, giving Americans the means to document and record their daily lives. Hundreds of thousands of these cameras were produced, and as a result, small collections of photographs were assembled and preserved in an astonishing assortment of albums, with photographs as the raw material for collages, constructions and text experiments.

Snapshot Chronicles is a visual exploration of the creative outpouring made possible by the camera. Friends, family, travel, domestic life, special occasions, the workplace, farm and city life—these were all intermingled in early albums in surprising and dynamic forms. Men, women and even children became the creators of their own visual biographies, and documenters of previously unprecedented aspects of American life.

A book about old photo albums. Yet it’s the small touches by the designer that put this book over the top for me, especially the themed gridlike collages composed of details from the photos. Exquisite.