This archive of family snapshots from the 1980s and 1990s is a candid look at American life
A trove of Midwestern photos is now available online
At the University of Northern Iowa, a radical reimagining of 20th-century social history has taken shape, in the form of a recently established picture archive. Fortepan Iowa is the sister site to a Hungarian collection with parallel aims. Similarly, this collection of high-resolution, copyright-free family snapshots and vernacular imagery is a feast of middle-American life from 1860 to 2000. The pictures are common. But the cumulate worth of their repurposing is a rare meditation on history and collective memory as seen through the eyes of ordinary folks.
The archive’s mission, to amass an open-source visual history of the state, is a response to what organizers call the “typical great men version of history.” Instead, Fortepan privileges candid, amateur snapshots over news pictures or official narratives, casting history from a “grassroots perspective” that leaves room for quieter moments of private experience.
The images here, culled from the archive’s 1980s and 1990s depository, achieve the organizer’s goal of charting alternative threads of interpretive history. They also raise questions about nostalgia and memory as products of period specific technologies. In 2017, the layering of retro aesthetics onto the present is ubiquitous. That this phenomenon is essential or enduring, however, is not entirely self-evident. Exponential growth of personal photography in the 20th century provided raw material for the conditional embedding of sentiment into everyday space and experience. Pictures, always a dialogue with the past, became receptacles for people’s personal histories. Over time they replaced the memories themselves.
As years pass, whatever the ultimate benefits of archives like Foretepan Iowa prove to be (ancestral facial recognition anyone?), connecting to these silent histories will forever be complicated by our inability to fathom time as anything other than the space between the present and what was.
