Rochford’s Girls I Have Known

Around the turn of the century, photography became much more democratically available. Eastman Kodak had a motto, “You press the button, we do the rest.” The album became ubiquitous in American households. What distinguishes this is that a teenage boy has taken that structure and done something totally unique with it. This young man has laid out his romantic ideal. Piecing together private musings, photographs, illustrations, handwritten notes passed back- and- forth in class The entire album is a kind of study of women. Young Daniel has handed out these questionnaires to the girls that he's most interested in that capture what he considers the essence of each of these individuals. In a way it really captures teenage irreverence. Each spread has its own quirky uses of photography. This page devoted to a woman named Mary Cared, He must have gotten back multiple prints of this group picture, and cut out a tiny little image and pasted it down onto the back of this envelope. When you open up that envelope, we have yet another copy of this picture except for he has cut out the heads of all the people he’s not interested in looking at. The entire album is an exercise in exploring what the pictures mean to him, and what people's relationship to photographs can tell us in particular about notions of romantic ideals or the ways in which ideals of beauty were constantly being mediated through photography and through this rapidly expanding media culture. Unsuprisingly, Daniel Rochford became a journalist and this--like all great literature— the more precise he becomes about the specifics of his own existence, the more it opens out onto the most general, relatable experience. This entire album is really kind of a self-portrait.