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.

To some degree, all social networking portals offer this kind of experience. Facebook sets itself apart in two important ways: first, it has a direct genealogical relationship to older forms of social networking; second, it has been developed aesthetically in a manner that reflects that history. A quick comparison between Facebook and its rivals demonstrates its unique heritage. Take, for example, its most well-known competitor, MySpace, which originated as a virtual hangout for musicians and maintains a multimedia feel. The average MySpace page is chaotic, dotted with animations and commentary and overlayed with music. Pages representing corporations and political campaigns rub elbows with individual users in a largely unpoliced virtual free-for-all.

By comparison, user pages on Facebook look spartan. Each one consists of a single image surrounded by personal information in the form of text against a clean white background. Other users' comments, and any links, are relegated to smaller spaces at the bottom of the page. In the carte de visite tradition, the site is built around singular, iconic images. (2)

Facebook also reflects tradition in its preservation of exclusivity. While the site now allows anyone to join, users can carefully customize privacy settings, and most pages are only visible to fellow members of local, school, or work-related networks. In contrast, MySpace and Friendster allow anyone surfing the Internet substantial access to member profiles, even if visitors are not registered with the sites. Facebook began at Harvard University, and it maintains a more cliqueish, clubby feel.

While the basic structure of Facebook has a distinguished, if musty, pedigree, it employs twenty-first century technologies to break new ground in vernacular photography. Every user page functions as a modern day analogue of the carte de visite, but the network also allows users to upload personal photograph albums--"My Summer Vacation," "Graduation," etc.--onto their pages, layering modern functionality on top of the nineteenth-century paradigm. The site's commitment to photography is reflected here by its infrastructure, which allows users to upload and link an unlimited number of photograph albums to their personal pages. This primarily visual focus has paid off: according to Facebook's statistics, it is now the most popular photo-sharing site in the United States, with almost two billion user photos uploaded to its servers.

In themselves, user albums are nothing special. They are simple collections of photographs, generated by individual amateurs seeking to document their lives and play with the photographic medium. Pictures of friends and family are interspersed with the occasional landscape or sunset. However, Facebook is unusual among networking sites in that it provides an easily navigable interface that permits users to "tag" pictures they view and jump from tag to tag. (Photo "tagging" is the ability to label pictures by subject matter.) In theory, identical tags--"New Orleans," for instance, or "dog"--employed by multiple end-users create a sort of super album, an amalgamation of pictures by multiple authors with the same subject matter.

Tagging is not an uncommon feature on photo sites or the Internet at large. But within the matrix of an image-oriented social networking service like Facebook, it completely reshapes the way that photographic identity is created and viewed by others. It is a truism of photographic criticism to note that albums tell the viewer more about who the creator wants to be and chooses to remember than who the creator actually is. The individuals and families who construct albums prefer to focus on happy times and memorable events that mark transitions as they struggle to build what Susan Sontag called a family's "portrait-chronicle of itself." (3) The result is often flat and one-sided. Family slideshows and album viewings are notorious for the fascination they inspire in the compiler and the boredom they generate in most spectators.

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Tagging tosses out the old system. True, users can still create albums as they please, and the albums may still suffer from the bloat of excessive imagery. But these albums have lost ground as the standard for an individual's photographic identity. Ask any Facebook user--if you want to get a visual impression of someone's life from Facebook, you do not look at the user's albums. Instead, you click on a link the site provides to the aggregate album of every picture tagged with the user's name. The aggregate provides a far more comprehensive overview of an individual's social circle and activities than any older album format.

What all this means is that the traditional album, which served as the standard of vernacular photographic identity for over one hundred years, now has a serious rival. Moreover, the competition--this as-yet-unnamed aggregate of photographs--represents a major departure from the basic theory underlying the album. Albums assert the authority of the maker. While their goal is to provide photographic documentation of a life, the end result is inevitably a form of self-expression as well, a manifestation of an individual organizing will or authority. At the end of the day, a traditional album is a form of wish fulfillment, one person's attempt to express his or her desired relationship to the surrounding world.

Insofar as it depends upon the gift of others' photographic tokens of affection, the carte de visite album (or a user's personalized Facebook network) represents a position closer to communal authority. The aggregate album strips the individual of authority entirely It is the composite portrait of an individual created by the community, an emergent property of the system made possible by the sheer volume of photographs created today. As a by-product of its incidental nature--none of the photographers shooting these pictures aim to provide a comprehensive picture of their subjects' lives--the aggregate album offers a kind of objectivity that the albums of the past could not. Finally, the immateriality of digital technology precludes any authorial organization to these tagged pictures: since they can be viewed as expandable thumbnails that do not have to be flipped through, any attempt at sequencing is futile. In contrast to the strictly guided tour of the traditional album, Facebook allows viewers to navigate within and between albums as their own interest dictates.

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Naturally, individuals still get an opportunity for self-presentation. The signature photograph that appears next to a user's biographical information--the image analogous to the portrait on the carte de visite--is entirely determined by the user. Any attempt to characterize the kinds of portraits chosen by users on Facebook quickly reveals its own fruitlessness. The only theme that unites the varied forms of presentation from page to page is a decided lack of adherence to any single convention. Some of this freedom is the product of digital technology. With tiny, sensitive digital cameras that offer numerous post-production options, amateurs can afford to play fast and loose with their self-images. They may be in black and white or in color. They are shot from all angles. Subjects appear in all styles of dress, from casual to formal wear. Conventions do not really exist.

At a more basic level, though, there are underlying similarities between these pictures. Most users select snapshots of themselves taken by friends and family, or even self-portraits. Studio shots rarely make an appearance. Perhaps as a consequence of the demise of the studio and the democratization of picture taking, a new form of iconic portrait appears in a number of these pictures: the cropped self. Social norms dictate that most snapshots be taken with friends, relatives, and teammates, so amateur photographers have a difficult time finding pictures of themselves alone. In order to create a personal portrait, they visually wrench themselves from their social contexts, cropping tightly to eliminate other people. These incisions are not always clean, and the results often look like photographs from Nikki S. Lee's 2005 "Parts" series, featuring stray arms, cheeks, and noses intruding into the supposedly personal frame.

These severed self-portraits serve as a neat visual symbol of the larger implications of tagging for vernacular photography. The "self," they seem to say, is best understood as a piece of a larger social network, not as an autonomous essence. Likewise, the best visual record of the self is not the album's carefully constructed presentation of an individual, or even the individual's picture of his or her social network. Instead, the best documentation is a composite record, one created through countless interactions with other human beings. This new kind of record is a strange beast, but it reflects the spirit of the time. In the Internet age, the expert authority of the encyclopedia is being threatened by a collection of unpaid articles composed communally, and free online publications are bringing the outlets of traditional media to their knees. It is only natural that traditional photographic assertions of authority--in this case, the album--should come under fire as well.

The aggregate album is still in the fetal stages of its development. Its future direction will depend on the increasing popularity of Facebook and other hybrid dot-coms that combine the promotion of individual user identities (social networking sites, dating services, personal Web pages, etc.) with photo-sharing portals. But the early signs are encouraging that, from this strange offspring of a nineteenth-century model of friendship and twenty-first-century technology, an entirely novel form of "portrait-chronicle" is emerging: one that promises to define the individual in a different way, impartially, through the collective eyes of the community.

J. MACNEILL MILLER is a freelance writer living in New York City. You can read more of his writing on visual culture at www.page291.com/blog.

NOTES 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, o. 69 (July 1863), 8. 2. As Facebook has opened its site to customizable additions from external developers, the strict aesthetics of the site may be vulnerable to change, depending on user preference. Some of the new "applications" being offered by third-party developers include maps of personal travels, areas for communal drawing, and music playlists. It is too early to tell how large of an impact these changes will have on Facebook's overall look and focus, but as of this writing they remain minimal. Interestingly, the carte de visite album saw similar experiments in novelties and gimmicks once it became an established household curio. Some manufacturers marketed albums that contained such novel additions as clocks and even built-in music boxes. 3. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 8.