The impersonal album: chronicling life in the digital age.

To the modern eye, Victorian photograph albums bear an uncanny resemblance to Victorian dinosaurs. Thick and clunky, wrapped in rough leather, they inspire awe due less to their grace than their bulk. The Victorians seem to have had a taste for gravitas, whereas twenty-first century citizens yearn for technologies that make life faster, sleeker, and more immediate. Our dinosaurs are trim, agile creatures that dart in search of prey; our photography is quick, dry, and weightless.

At first glance, the widespread adoption of digital photography appears to be the ultimate renunciation of the very era that spawned the medium. Once lauded by nineteenth-century commentators for its ability to reproduce reality without the intervention of man's flawed hand, photography now offers even the most bumbling of amateurs the opportunity to alter their images. The offspring of chemistry and optics has rebelled against its conservative background and entered the hazy domains of postmodern art and virtual reality.

But, old habits die hard and echoes of the photographic past reverberate in the virtual corridors. To see how nineteenth-century tradition lingers on in contemporary practice, the curious need look no further than the latest generation of amateur photographers. Albums still thrive, at least in stripped-down digital form, on photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Snapfish. It may come as a surprise, however, that the best place to see tradition alive and well is on a site not ostensibly devoted to photography at all: the college-centric social network known as Facebook.

In some ways Facebook is hardly unique. Sites like Friendster and MySpace preceded it, and they all provide essentially the same service--the ability to dynamically map and monitor friends over the Internet. In each case a user "joins" a Web site, creating an account that allows him or her to customize a personal Web page. Users then interact with other members of the online community, viewing their pages and electing to add certain members as friends. The end result is a constant work-in-progress, a virtual web of connected nodes that describe personal relationships.

What sets Facebook apart and gives it an exalted place in visual culture is the circumstance leading to its inception. Unlike other social networking sites, Facebook began in 2004 as a straightforward virtual translation of a familiar material paradigm: the "freshman facebook." Facebook caught on so quickly precisely because it was not revolutionary. The students who represented its original target market were already comfortable with the idea of their photographs and biographical information being available to their peers, since the freshman facebook remains a staple on many college campuses. In translating the college facebook into the digital realm, however, the site's creators (Mark Zuckerberg, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin) breathed new life into what was really a vestige of the nineteenth century.

Like most intriguing characters, the facebook has a lengthy backstory. It is not simply a bizarre phenomenon that sprang up autonomously on campuses across the nation. Instead, it is a sort of institutionalized echo of a popular household object gone extinct: the album of cartes de visite.

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When Andre Adolphe-Eugene Disderi patented his process for producing multiple prints from a single collodion plate in the 1850s, the idea of miniature portraits had been in circulation for several years. While theorists discussed the legal and political possibilities of picture identification, Disderi got rich by selling the prints (called "cartes de visite" for their similarity in size to visiting cards) as keepsakes to be swapped among friends and admirers. Despite their popularity at the time, the portraits are less than revealing to the modern viewer. The lengthy exposures of the collodion process necessitated stiff poses and precluded the capture of the more fleeting, individual facial expressions. Subjects--many of whom had aspirations for upward social mobility--almost invariably chose to wear their Sunday best. The resulting images suffer from a homogeneity of clothing and composition that makes many sitters virtually indistinguishable.

Photographers had little incentive to provide more personal representations of their sitters. Pictures of Napoleon III, the British royals, and American celebrities made the format so popular that any financially savvy photographer was more concerned with maximizing production than examining individual character. By 1863, cartes de visite were such an international phenomenon that Oliver Wendell Holmes described them, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, as "the social currency, the sentimental 'green-backs' of civilization." (1) Their iconic (if impersonal) portrayal of individuals, cost-effective manufacture, and collectibility helped secure their popularity. Families bought albums designed specifically for the display of cartes de visite, plugging in pictures of their friends and relatives alongside the occasional politician or celebrity as a record of their social status and experiences.

While albums as a cultural phenomenon long predate the invention of the carte de visite, the new albums represented the first variation of the form marketed specifically for the collection and display of photographic imagery. Their intricately worked covers and overall bulk mimic the appearance of Bibles and prayer books of the same era, but the format of carte de visite albums was also determined by the simple facts of the medium. Carte albums typically consisted of thick pages with pre-cut slots for the insertion of two cards back-to-back. Though they seem clunky now, their ability to hold numerous portraits in a dignified manner made these specialized albums the preferred method of picture presentation at the time. Among the upper and middle classes, the carte de visite album grew to be a personal treasure of the highest value, second only to the family Bible.

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But times change, and the forms of society that gave birth to the carte de visite gradually faded away. A number of cultural shifts contributed to the extinction of the carte de visite. On a practical level, families filled up their albums and stopped buying. From a technological and aesthetic perspective, photography changed. Consumers grew tired of tiny portraits whose hastily pictured subjects they could only scrutinize with a magnifying glass. More sensitive and portable camera models, culminating in the introduction of Kodak's Brownie camera, drove the thriving business of studio portraiture to near obsolescence. As travel and dislocation increased, the idea of compiling pictures of every member of a community must have appeared less desirable and less possible. Cartes de visite and their associated albums disappeared in tandem with the culture that supported them.

With its rigid borders and politics determined by insular social interactions, the modern-day college campus resembles the bourgeois communities of the nineteenth century. Its photographic associations are also notably antiquated. More than a hundred years after snapshot photography and home portraits became feasible, many schools continue to call upon studio photographers for annual student and faculty portraits. It comes as little surprise, then, that in these breeding grounds of the young elite, echoes of the carte de visite album still survive, perpetuated in the institution of the freshman facebook.

Like its relative the yearbook, the facebook is a photographic document created by a community for the purpose of visually defining community life. The difference between the two lies in their distinct methodologies: the yearbook seeks to capture events occurring within a specific time, while the facebook seeks to capture a community through the appearances of its members. It is a photographic directory of individuals, a sort of social catalog of the people who may offer friendship, love, and sexual encounters within a society. The yearbook is an institutional organ with its analog in the general-purpose photograph album; the facebook bears a more specific relation to the photograph album's forebear, the album of cartes de visite.

The facebook is not an exact clone of its predecessor. In the course of being adopted by the college administration, it lost its personal aspect: it became dedicated to the community as a whole, rather than one individual's experience of the community. Still, in its attempt to gather a complete visual roster of the members of a population, it provides a glimpse into the monomaniacal social quest that the collection of cartes de visite implies. The digital edition provides an experience even closer to the original. It allows users to personalize their social positions as their predecessors did--by turning their peers into collectibles. Every time someone logs into the Facebook Web site, they unknowingly enter a kind of nineteenth-century virtual-reality simulator, charting and reveling in social taxonomies in a distinctly Victorian way.