The History Of Yearbook Pictures

Everyone loves getting their high school yearbooks at the end of every school year

. It. Yearbook pictures in particular mark the passage of old man time and documents the changes we all go through. It's been over 150 years since yearbook pictures were first introduced into our culture.

The man who started the craze was named George K. Warren. Born in 1832, he lived and worked as a photographer in Boston for much of his life. This was a time of much photographic invention and discovery as the camera in its simplest form was still very new.

The good idea that Warren had was to capitalize on how you can make limitless copies of a photograph from just one negative image. He realized that if he could get people to buy lots of extra copies of their photos he would have quite a promising business venture.

Catering to the inherent desire for community and remembrance, Warren soon had college students buying multiple copies of a single image of themselves in order to trade them with other classmates. At that time, yearbooks with photos were still unheard of. In the beginning, it was all about trading the photos themselves.

When students started taking their photo collections to bookbinders to have them bound into albums, the idea of the yearbook was born. Students would customize their photo books with gilded title pages and other frills. This is how the very first school yearbooks came to be.

It is fascinating to look back at this time period and imagine the first yearbook photos being assembled into the very first yearbooks. Warren was first popular in the 1860s, the same time the Civil War was taking place between the northern states and the southern confederacy. With his innovative business idea, Warren gained popularity. He was one of the primary yearbook photographers for more than fifteen years

There is a 1960 copy of a Warren yearbook that has been preserved all these years. The photos are all of stoic young men in sepia tone. Today, that historic yearbook resides safely in a New Jersey museum of American culture.

The yearbook has changed quite a bit. What it was a hundred years ago is nearly unrecognizable as a yearbook compared to a modern version. For one thing, yearbooks are more popular in high schools now whereas Warren first introduced them at colleges. Other than the portrait section, more and more student taken photos are included in yearbook sections. It used to be that only professional photos were used throughout the entire yearbook.

Today, of course, the yearbook pictures are taken by a professional who usually comes to the school for that specific purpose. All other photos in the yearbook are usually provided by the students and teachers themselves. What began as a get quick rich scheme for a talented photograph has become a deeply entrenched and beloved part of American culture.

by: addyieweeks

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