Introduction

What is an Album?

The album, whose origins some scholars place as early as Classical Antiquity[1], is a heterogeneous object that has a fundamental role in the feminine culture and sociability of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and Latin America. In our continent, however, it has barely begun to receive attention within literary, cultural, and gender studies. A typical nineteenth-century album consisted in a bound book with blank pages that served as a repository for various collectible objects and writings. In the albums, their owners stored signatures and manuscripts from friends close and far, musical pieces, drawings or poems of their own or of others—by amateurs or recognized poets and designers who were sought after for the task of writing in albums—translations, and, with the passing of decades and advancements in technology, to these elements were added photographs, newspaper clippings, and postcards of visited or emblematic spaces or personalities. On many occasions, personal annotations were also added to the gathered objects. For women, the album was an acceptable method of having a relationship with the act of writing, as well as with other women and men; a space in which one shaped oneself with the exercise of reading and/or copying text and images, and a way of constructing alternative bonds outside of domestic spaces. The album therefore can be analyzed as a social, historical, and cultural phenomenon that casts light over our understanding of the notions of public and private, social relationships, the practice of collecting and consuming printed culture, gender dynamics, ideas around art and literature, as well as the visual and material culture of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth.

The Uses of the Album by Soledad Acosta de Samper

A popular use of the album between women and men of the nineteenth century is in the format of “friendship albums,” which were used to gather dedications (written or drawn) and signatures by friends and social contacts.  An album of this type belonging to José María Samper is included in this exhibit, but there is no record that Soledad Acosta de Samper had a similar one. However, we can assume, by her trajectory and work with the other types of albums that we will see below, that she must have had an album of this type that may have been lost or not conserved as part of her “relevant” work. Friendship between women was not understood to have the same public and political character as friendship between men (fraternity), and much less the writing that women produced in intimate and affective circuits. A personal album, therefore, might not have been valued as an archival object. A similar case occurred with her diary, found less than two decades ago among unclassified manuscripts, which was published through the work of Carolina Alzate. Neither personal albums nor women’s friendship albums exist in abundance in Latin American archives, even though there are indeed records of nineteenth-century writers participating in their creation. If we revise poetic anthologies of the nineteenth century, we can note a great number of poems titled “In an Album” or “In the Album of…” by figures such as Ricardo Palma, Rafael Pombo, Andrés Bello, Carolina Freyre de Jaimes, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, amid many others.

It is necessary to clarify, however, that this “absence” of a so-called friendship album is compensated for, over the span of the literary career of Soledad Acosta, with multiple intellectual projects in which the author unfurls a “gallery” or “album” of women with whom she shares professional interests and whom she admires or considers exemplary for the advancement of women. Among them, La mujer en la sociedad moderna (The Woman in Modern Society, 1895) can be mentioned, a book dedicated to the presentation of biographical profiles or “paintings,” as she called them, of nineteenth-century women, from “the queen in her throne to the artist in her studio” (VII). The writer’s bond with these women can be thought of, then, as a link or a transhistorical, professional, and didactic friendship.

What appears in the series presented in this exhibit is, therefore, a great number of albums with multiple uses and extremely rich meanings. Each shows Soledad Acosta in dialogue with the aesthetics and printed material of her time and as an expert in the prevailing social and formative conventions of education and feminine sensibilities. Her handling of the materials gathered in these volumes shows Acosta de Samper as a woman with autonomy and authority over her own and other’s words, which she edits, corrects, and classifies with a logic and understanding of the relationship between reading and manual work that are completely deliberate and personal. This exhibit echoes the collector’s logic behind these materials and presents this series of albums organized into three main galleries.

[1] Leonardo Romero Tobar signals various stages in the life of the album and indicates that some of their predecessors would be, for example, the blank tablet in which the edicts of the praetorium of ancient Rome (album praetoris) were inscribed and the libri amicorum, a secularized custom introduced by the humanists that consisted in gathering the dedications of diverse authors to some known figure in a manuscript volume (9).