‘This postcard album will tell my name, when I am quite forgotten’: Cultural Memory and First World War Soldier Photograph Albums

Abstract

Since the Crimean and American Civil Wars in the nineteenth century, photography has allowed societies to experience war through the collective understanding of photographic representation as an inscription or mnemonic cue for recollections of past events. However, the First World War ushered in new vernacular cultural practices of photography which radically altered how both war was represented and experienced through photography. This shift, in turn, engendered new private and domestic forms of post-war remembrance through the photographic image. Kodak's marketing of the Vest Pocket Autographic Camera which became known as the ‘Soldier's Camera’, allowed soldiers on the battle front and their families on the home front to experience the war and the formation of post-war memory outside of the iconic images of military heroes and battlefield conflict. Vernacular photography allowed for intimate portrayals of everyday soldier life to be visually displayed in private arrangements of photographs in photo-albums compiled by soldiers and their families as forms of post-war remembrance. Discussing photograph albums compiled by Irish soldiers and nurses, this essay explores the place of vernacular photography in personal commemorative acts by soldiers and nurses in the aftermath of the First World War. By treating vernacular soldier photographs of World War I as social objects that allow relationships to be formed and maintained across time, the essay argues that the materiality of the photograph as image-object can be explored to consider how the exchange, circulation and consumption of photographs allow for the accumulating and expending of histories and memories of the First World War and its aftermath.