Bygone days preserved, bound together, during photo album workshop in Squirrel Hill
'This takes you back...There can be good and bad, but the good outweighs the bad'
Some memories are best held with glue. Printed, trimmed and labeled, photographs depicting living loved ones, deceased spouses, cats and beach scenes helped participants of a photo album-making program reminisce and create new ties.
Seated around a table inside the 10.27 Healing Partnership in Squirrel Hill, program participants interspersed stories with requests to pass a pair of scissors or adhesive.
Margaret Laske, 86, applied glue tape to the back of a photograph before pressing the image of her 15-year-old cat against a handmade ribbon-bound paper booklet. On an adjacent page she included a photo of her late husband.
“Holidays are the hardest when you’re alone,” she said.
Fellow Squirrel Hill resident Shabwawe Quinn, 69, peered down at decades-old pictures of her children dancing.
“A lot has changed,” she said. “You start looking at the past and you start reviewing it.”
As participants swapped tales about relatives, mistakes and travel, Elana Moise Vitek, 54, cut heart shapes from cardstock.
The multicolored pieces could be inserted into plastic sleeves or used for labeling in an album, she told the Chronicle.
Vitek, a newly hired member of the Healing Partnership, said she designed the July 21 program in order to “help people capture their stories.”
In so many homes, “old pictures sit in boxes and don’t get appreciated,” she continued. Bringing people together and providing supplies and space to share stories is a way to “do something about it.”
The exercise was hardly new; photo albums date back more than 150 years. During the mid-19th century, picture books largely contained “staged portrait shots of upper-class families in conventional poses, wearing their best dress, alongside studio props,” according to the Ontario-based St. Catharines Museum.
At the start of the 20th century, access to photography and the creation of albums expanded with Kodak’s release of its Brownie camera. Consisting of a cardboard box and convex-concave lens, the camera relied on roll film. Given the camera’s $1 price (equivalent to about $38 today) and ease of use, picture taking flourished.
As photographers captured industrialization, migration, two world wars and modernization, global events were preserved and told in intimate ways. At the Heinz History Center, more than 700,000 photographs, prints and negatives depict the history of western Pennsylvania. Within the museum’s Rauh Jewish Archives, several family photo albums portray prominent Pittsburghers, including the Abrams, Rauh and Ohringer families.
Journalist Rosanne Skirble told the Chronicle in 2014 that while helping her widowed mother move into an assisted living apartment, Skirble discovered a photo album belonging to her late stepfather. In it were stills and documents depicting not only his contributions to the state of Israel but the story of a British-born man, who, before eventually coming to Pittsburgh, joined the Haganah as a weapons instructor, trained former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and met then-head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and future Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion.
The beauty of photo albums, Vitek said while sitting at a table in the 10.27 Healing Partnership inside the Jewish Community Center, is “they keep us connected to other people.” For some, the process of mulling through pictures and remembering bygone days will spark sadness; but, “if we can learn to hold onto our pain we can help people with theirs.”
Before the hourlong program was complete, Laske finished gluing her photographs to colored pages. She left room beneath each picture to label the image.
Resting nearby were scores of pens and markers — no erasers.
Vitek said if a mistake is made when writing in a photo album, she encourages people to “own it.”
“It’s like life,” she added. There’s no need to delete it and “pretend it’s not there.”
Quinn, who continued placing pictures in plastic sleeves, said she had never worked on a photo album before and appreciated the advice.
“This takes you back,” she said. “There can be good and bad, but the good outweighs the bad.”
Helping others creatively express themselves is part of the goal, Vitek said.
“People light up when they remember the love they had. And it’s beautiful to see people smile.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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