The Art of Scrapbooking

Each Wednesday, I write a post from my dissertation.

Many scrapbookers and industry workers consider scrapbookers to be artists and historians, though professional artists and historians may and do disagree (see Helfand 2005). Industry workers, in particular, emphasize the artistry in scrapbooking. They call it art and refer to themselves as artists.  Scrapbook store owners reinforce this perception by displaying scrapbook pages in frames on the walls of their stores and individual scrapbookers sometimes do this in their homes. Though many scrapbooks may basically be photographs glued to pretty paper, requiring little skill, many scrapbookers draw on fairly advanced techniques and pull in techniques from other arts. Scrapbookers paint, assemble their own embellishments, draw, doodle, sew, create items out of clay, attach eyelets (or grommets), staple, sand, emboss, and more in their scrapbooks. Because scrapbooking draws on such a diverse set of skills, many scrapbookers quickly learn to shop outside of the scrapbooking section of a store, too. Respondents use not just the scrapbook store, but also the hardware store for sources of supplies.

Scrapbookers may be artists in that they draw on skills other artists use and produce scrapbook pages worthy of being displayed outside of a scrapbook. Scrapbooking may be an art, but scrapbookers are not going to starve for their art. Industry workers note that the economic turmoil beginning in 2008 impacted their business. One industry worker states:

scrapbooking comes under crafting and that’s something that people spend their discretionary dollars on. It’s not a necessity. So people have to cut somewhere and they’ve found that a lot of them are cutting on their craft budget that becomes a little more difficult for us.

Shortly after this interview, this store owner closed the doors to her business. Even though scrapbooking is very important to people, it is still just a hobby and as a hobby, it is an extra.

Industry workers are much more likely than scrapbookers to discuss scrapbooking in terms of art. Scrapbookers, however, do not seem to see scrapbooking as always being art. For example, respondents point out how some of the stuff in the magazines is “really artsy” in comparison to what they do or that they are also artists in addition to scrapbookers, suggesting scrapbooking is not art. Another respondent describes scrapbooking as “an artistic way of displaying your photos,” while others talk about how some of their pages were more artistic than other pages because of the techniques used.

Scrapbooking as art is most clearly articulated when respondents describe what good and not-so-good scrapbooks looked like. Nearly all respondents have difficulty describing a not-so-good scrapbook because they say it is so subjective. Most refer to their early scrapbooks as examples of not-so-good scrapbooks instead of comparing their work to the work of others.

Is scrapbooking art? Is scrapbooking not-art? Can scrapbooking be both art and non-art? Join the conversation below or on facebook.

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Stephanie