Beyond the Album Covers: A Finding Aid for a Collection of Early Twentieth-century Snapshot Albums at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Amateur snapshot albums of the early twentieth century represent an important and severely underrepresented part of the history of photography. This thesis project considers thirteen snapshot photographic albums ranging from the 1900s to the 1970s gifted as part of a larger group of anonymous snapshot photographs to the MFA by collector Peter J. Cohen in 2015. These thirteen albums contain over 2,000 individual photographs and pieces of ephemera; therefore, this thesis includes a finding aid for this collection, creating a complete look beyond the covers of the albums. This finding aid documents information such as page numbers, number of photographs, processes of photographs, specific dates, locations, languages, captions, and more, and includes a short description of the album taking into consideration the physicality of the albums themselves. The purpose of this project is to document material aspects of the albums to make them more accessible to researchers.