More than a snapshot

For over 100 years, when you’d often have to wait a week to see your photos, film processors used photo wallets – cheery illustrated envelopes – to return your pictures to you. They showed what subjects were considered suitable for a snapshot: bright-eyed children, laughing couples, adorable pets and perfect landscapes; they also reinforced prohibitions by what they omitted. Drawing from the author’s personal collection of photo wallets from the 1900s to the 1990s, Annebella Pollen’s book charts a century of popular photography in Britain: the birth of a new mass leisure pastime mainly marketed towards women, the growth of camera ownership after the Second World War, and behind it all, the working conditions of the people processing the films. It commemorates a time when you never knew if you had captured a treasured memory or your finger in front of the lens.