Reality Scrapbooking – Getting Real on the Page

Reality Scrapbooking – Some people may call this an oxymoron, but reality scrapbooking has become its own genre. One day a friend and I were paging through a family album. They were only photos, but they seemed to portray a close family with many happy times together. He made a comment along the lines of “Pictures don’t tell you the whole truth.” He would be right. We often only scrapbook the “high points” of our lives, leaving out the “reality” of our lives as if they were only about being born, graduating, getting married, having children, birthdays, and so on. Yet, we know that our lives are so much more than all that. We have our own opinions, feelings, and thoughts about things and perhaps it is those things we most need to leave our own life impressions.

It is true that anyone can piece together photos to convey whatever he or she wants to convey. The challenge is to learn to scrapbook our imperfect lives, our everyday in a way that we shall call “reality scrapbooking.”

In a dissertation on scrapbooking, titled “Beyond Scraps: Narrating Traumatic Health Experiences Through Scrapbooking,” one lady, Dawn Reynolds, discussed at length of using reality scrapbooking to address trauma issues of patients and in particularly women. She used terms like “trauma scrapbook” and “trauma scrapbooking.”

While the reality of our lives do not always involve what we might term “traumatic,” can certainly still be significant. Reynolds, in her dissertation, asserts that scrapbooking has been used in a therapeutic manner, to express, for themselves and others, their “life experiences with issues such as domestic abuse, psychiatric disorders, and death among others, preserving their own stories, which in history have been overlooked in favor of family tales.” (Reynolds, p 34). So, reality scrapbooking can be the “contextualizing” of self and society.

Another way that reality scrapbooking has helped in the health field is in regard to patients with Alzheimer’s and their families. Sometime back I wrote an article on the subject, Scrapbooking for Alzheimer's Patients - Forget Me Not! specifically how scrapbooking could and has made a difference in communication between the patient and his or her family in the health care facilities.

Journaling is an important part of reality scrapbooking in that the scrapbooker is encouraged to share his or her stories with the layouts, giving the layout much more depth of meaning. Reynolds, commenting on the editors opinion in “The Scrapbook in American Life” that today’s scrapbooks are inadequate as primary sources for being devoid of context, with no attribution, provenance, history, or biographical information,” herself points out that the editors neglect to note ways contemporary scrappers supply useful context for their personal stories through journaling and biographical information. The journaling in this case is as “contextualized narration of emotions and events, recorded directly on the scrapbook page,”(Reynolds, p. 31), hence, “reality scrapbooking.”Trauma has been defined as “a foundational experience or set of experiences that significantly shape one’s life in the process resulting in emotional and/or physical or material turmoil.” As such, any experience that significantly affects someone can be applied to reality scrapbooking. Besides showing how reality scrapbooking can be used to express a traumatic event, Reynolds purpose is also to explore what she terms “scrapbooking activism” defined as “women embracing community involvement to express their feelings about a traumatic experience to which others can relate.” (Reynolds, p. 42). It can be said that reality scrapbooking not only allows the scrapbooker to express themselves, but also leads to opening up to community.

Historians and archeologists might both agree that a well thought out and preserved scrapbook could tell a whole lot about a people. According to Reynolds, “Thus, even though scrapbooks pose challenges for researchers, ….students of the craft can nonetheless glean relevant, useful information about the creator and her culture through carefully attending to the messages, techniques, and strategies contained within contemporary scrapbooking,” (Reynolds, p. 33). So, you never know how your true personal experiences might help someone else.

For myself, I have experienced several different “traumatic events” in my life I could share as my own reality scrapbooking. How many others like me have been ridiculed for their personal beliefs, bullied because of being different, or undergone some illness or surgical procedure and lived to tell about it? Since we are alive, should we not find a way to share it with others?

Healing Time - No matter what they tell you, it's individual. Some may say, "Don't let anyone rush you." Are they for real? I had six months the first time because I was left unemployed. My post-op is tomorrow - Everything seems fine, but my insides are sore and I worry about going back to work soon. I worry about all the usual demands of life and making it through this, as well as how it affects those around me. Maybe I shouldn't. But, I do." -October 25th, 2010.

Materials: Post-op I used fabric swatches, scribbler paints, gel pens, scrapbook paper from DCWV Pocket full of Posies, photos and hospital items. In The Lord is my Strength, I used fabric swatches, various scrapbook papers and a ballpoint pen.

Here are a few interesting books on the topic you might consider:

Imperfect Lives: Scrapbooking the Reality of Your Everyday

The Book of Us: A Guide to Scrapbooking About Relationships

The Book of Me: A Guide to Scrapbooking About Yourself

Creating Keepsakes: Scrapbooking Everyday Moments

Growing Up Me: A Guide to Scrapbooking Childhood Stories

Scrapbooking Your Adult Years: 185 Outstanding Ideas For Pages About Grown-ups (Memory Makers)

Out of Bounds: Scrapbooking Without Boundaries

Real.Life.Scrapbooking.

Return from Scrapbooking Reality to Homepage

New! Comments