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Around the World

The Grand Tour in Photo Albums
Princeton Architectural Press By Barbara Levine
and Kirsten Jensen

12 x 9 in; 208 pp ; 200 color images
Hardcover
Published in September, 2007
ISBN 1568987080
ISBN13 9781568987088

$55.00  

Around the World -- Snapshots, passenger lists, itineraries, and postcards from San Francisco flapper Vera Talbot's Far East adventure. Chicagoan Clara E. Whitcomb's travel diary containing pages filled with souvenir photos, maps, and a list of titles for a future book about her travels in Egypt. These are only two of the narratives that unfold in the beautifully designed pages of Around the World. From Cairo to Burma and back again, authors Barbara Levine and Kirsten Jensen transport readers back to the dawn of world travel when, Brownie cameras in tow, the middle class toured the world for the first time and painstakingly documented their discoveries within scrapbooks, diary entries, and pasted-on souvenir postcards.

Around the World traces the development of the travel photo album, from primarily narrative forms—ships' logs and diaries—into rich multimedia objects of sublime beauty. The book features a wealth of turn-of-the- twentieth-century photographs and ephemera such as passports, ship menus, calling cards, and newspaper clippings. Around the World evokes the pleasures of a time when the surroundings were taken in slowly and travel was an art in and of itself.

Barbara Levine runs Project b, a curatorial services and project management company. She was formerly Director of Exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is the co-author of Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album.

Kirsten M. Jensen has a PhD in art history from the City University of New York. Her most recent book is Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s.