Michael Snow | Scraps for Soldiers

Michael Snow

Scraps for Soldiers

Florence, Italy: Zona Archives, 2007

36 pp., 24 × 30 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 1000

Scraps for Soldiers is a reproduction of a wartime photo album inherited Michael Snow from his aunt Dimple F. Snow (1896-1978) who created it during and after the First World War (1913-1921). Dimple’s two brothers, Geoffrey (who died at war) and Gerald (the artist’s father) fought in the war, and the album, though intended as gift to be sent to those fighting oversees, was never sent. 

Below is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Michael just over ten years ago, when the title was his most recent: 

Dave Dyment: Am I right in thinking that A Survey, which is sort of a hybrid artist book-exhibition catalogue, is your first publication? 

Michael Snow: It is. I think of it as a bookwork, I did design it as a work, but it also has all of the other aspects of a catalogue. 

DD: It’s not uncommon to have a monograph or exhibition catalogue made with the artist’s involvement now, and to have it include elements of an artists’ book, but in 1970 that must’ve seemed pretty unique. The special edition came with multiples, a poster….

MS: Right, but it’s still not a ‘pure’ work, like Cover to Cover, because it does contain information. 

DD: To me the mangled catalogue imagery from the poster hints at some of the things later explored in Cover to Cover. 

MS: Yeah. There were two version of the book, there was a limited edition in a plastic box and we were supposed to make a hundred, but I think we made three or four (laughs). 

DD: The plexi-boxed edition was incomplete? 

MS: Well, maybe they did ten, but I know that we didn’t do them all. It was more of an artists’ book than the ‘trade edition’, so to speak. 

DD: But even the regular edition included a series of photographs uncommon to exhibition catalogues, the snapshot of the ‘photo biography”. There was one that particularly struck me. You were a little boy and you had just learned that if you stuck your feet out you could manipulate the photograph by foreshortening the perspective. 

MS: That’s right. I had my sister take that photograph. 

DD: It seems particularly prophetic to much of your later work…

MS: I have many, many of those types of photographs from that time, and I’ve been planning a book of them, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. I guess I better do it soon (laughs). 

DD: Well, there’s the recent publication of your Aunt Dimple’s photo album. Is it a straight facsimile, or are there interventions? 

MS: It’s a very good facsimile. Maurizio (Nannucci) asked me if I was interested in putting something out (on his Zona imprint) and I had been thinking about this thing for a while. But it documents such an entirely different world, that I was unsure if it could be of interest to other people. But I think in a strange sort of ethnographic way, it can be. The original book was called Scraps for the Soldiers and it was an empty book that one was invited to put photographs in and then send it to a loved one fighting in the war. 

DD: So that title wasn’t yours, that was what Eaton’s titled the blank book? 

MS: Yes, everything is reproduced exactly as it was, other than the identifier on the cover. The idea was that you’d send it to your brother or father, whoever was in France, fighting the war at the time. And my Aunt bought one and put her photographs in it, from those years, starting I think in 1916. Her brother, my father, was in the war. But she never mailed it. 

DD:  There’s quite a lot of happiness in the book, so you wonder if this was a testament to joy despite the war, or if it was deliberately designed to cheer up the soldiers. 

MS: The photographs were taken in the summer time. My grandfather’s family used to go to the Royal Muskoka, one of those huge hotels in the wilderness. They were very big, with golf courses and good cuisine. A lot of these pictures were taken in relation to that time, which was admittedly unusual for Ontario of that era. So I think you’re right, they weren’t necessarily unhappy times. These are also all real snapshots, with none of the strain that would have been evident a few years earlier. This was a camera that was easy to shoot…

DD: That’s interesting, so the joy in the pictures was a possible result of being photographed? Because it was still an uncommon occurrence at the time. 

MS: I think the images are from between 1916 to 1919.

DD: I recall thinking that the dates indicated that book was in use well after the war. That when it missed its chance to be sent to a soldier, it just became a scrapbook. Is it your most recent artists’ book?

MS: Yes.