The “Althea Hurst scrapbook”. Discovering the Photographic Memories of Four African American Teachers’ European Tour in 1938 (special issue "Camera Memoria: Photographic Memories from the Margins")

In the summer of 1938, four African American teachers from Cincinnati decided to tour Europe, on their own, by steamship and train. Back home in Avondale, Cincinnati, Althea Hurst created a scrapbook from the snapshot photographs she took, but also from the many postcards, tourist brochures, guidebooks, menus, transport timetables, maps, commercial and artistic illustrations she collected, all accompanied by itinerary and correspondence, precise legends, detailed captions and personal annotations. Some pages of the “Althea Hurst Scrapbook” were on display at the Public Library of Cincinnati in 2016, and the album, entirely digitalized, can be viewed online. This scrapbook is a typical example of a practice of collecting pictures linked to travel. It is at the same time exceptional because it was intended, from the beginning, not only to document a personal journey, but also to compare historical descriptions to actual places, and to encourage African American students to travel. The “Althea Hurst Scrapbook” will be put in relation to the broader practice of travel photo albums and described as a hybrid object combining images, written annotations, and other materials, thus merging personal photographic memories and educational documentation.