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By the early 2000s, scrapbook construction in the United States had shifted from a relatively private mode of assemblage into a visible practice bolstered by robust marketing and public venues for creation and display. But today's scrapbooks often also perform the value of activities long characterized as ephemeral, mundane, and private by recasting them-using archival-safe products and visual documentation- as durable, artistic, and public. In effect, these books perform everyday lives. Arbiters of culture have questioned the authenticity or aesthetic merit of these exhibits in moves that deflect attention from the risks that attend any form of cultural documentation, including their own. Because scrapbooking makes visible the estrangement and objectification that occur when experience is entextualized, this popular hobby prompts reflections about ethnographic practice, the risks of performance, and the regulation of cultural hierarchies more generally.
we were gathered at dozens of round tables in the ballroom of a Utah hotel, and the closing commencement exercises for Creating Keepsakes University (CKU), a threeday instructional camp for contemporary scrapbook makers, were underway. The others at my table-two Nevada neighbors that I'd met a few days earlier, a mother-daughter pair from northern Utah that I remembered from a class that morning, and three women whose faces were new to me-had finished looking through the bags of merchandise they'd received at the door and were focused instead on Shelley Fuhr, who stood with a microphone just below the bannered main dais. She'd just won first place in the weekend's journaling competition and had been invited to share a few words with the crowd.
After telling the hundreds of assembled scrapbookers that she'd made an eighteen-hour trip from South Africa to be with them, Shelley explained that her winning layout had been thrown out of a competition earlier in the year because judges had deemed her six weeks of work too accomplished. Disappointed, she protested-only to find that a magazine wanted to offer her her own feature column instead. "You must never give up," she concluded, just because you "don't know the end of the tunnel." To the cheers of the crowd, she advised, "Just go where you're afraid."
As organizers readied materials for the next set of awards, event emcee Lisa Bearnson, founding editor of a niche...