Common Bonds: Birmingham Snapshots, 1900-1950 Exhibit

One of the Birmingham Public Library (BPL) Archives’ most popular exhibits, Common Bonds: Birmingham Snapshots, 1900-1950, will again be on display in the Central Library’s Fourth Floor Gallery.

Including almost 300 images from the Archives’ collections and private collections, the exhibit highlights the simple snapshot photos that preserve a moment, tell a story, and record life’s milestones. Snapshots illustrate the common bonds of people creating their own visual biographies—mothers chronicling their children’s growth, young men and women proudly leaning against automobiles, families playing in snow, friends being goofy. And for Birmingham, a place often remembered for its divisions, snapshots show the common interests, affections, and aspirations of people—black and white, wealthy and not—who shared far more than even they realized.

Originally displayed at BPL in 2002, Common Bonds traveled to Samford University in 2003, the Reykjavik (Iceland) Museum of Photography in 2003-2004, and Vulcan Park and Museum in 2006.

Common Bonds was funded by a generous grant from the Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.