Photo albums don't simply represent but celebrate, in an idealized form, individuals in their relationships with family and friends.
References
1.
StuartChalfen.Snapshot Version of Life (Bowling Green State University Press, 1987). An excellent sociological study, based on interviews, survey research, and the examination of 200 photograph collections, of what Americans do when they take photographs and look at albums.
2.
KatherineHoffman.Concepts of Identity: Historical and Contemporary Images and Portraits of Family and Self (HarperCollins, 1996). An art historian's analysis of how 20th-century portraits and photographs have represented families.
3.
MarianneHirsch.Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Harvard University Press, 1997). Analyzes the use of photography in the autobiographies of Mark Twain, August Strindberg, Walter Benjamin, and Christa Wolf, with implications for the ways men and women claim control over the narratives of their own lives.
