Letter of Recommendation: Souvenir Photo Viewers

Kate: I have two of those Photo viewers hanging off my lamp on my desk at home. One is from the 90's of me with my wife and young kids while in Lake Placid. I was thrilled to buy this once I saw what this old-guy photographer was doing. I say this because the other viewer I have is of my parents in the 1960s sitting in a restaurant in NYC (probably the 37th St Hideaway). This is my favorite picture of all. Your piece made me cry.

I have several photo viewers that belonged to my parents. The photos of them were taken at weddings, banquets, etc. I don't understand the writer's comment that they come into focus gradually. Mine are very clear immediately upon viewing. I do understand that people take photos now to "build their brand." What I don't get is the "why"of it. Does anybody else think more highly of these people because they post photos of their entire lives? Who cares but them? I stopped going to museums because I can't get near the art due to people taking selfies. The entire process seems like narcissism run amok. A guard at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam spent ten minutes explaining one of Rembrandt's paintings to me after I managed to scoot over to the side to get away from the selfie mob so I could actually see it. He told me how nice it was to talk to a person who was actually interested in the painting, not just in a photo of themselves with the painting. Are these folks with their phones capable of enjoying anything they don't view through a lens?

I have a few of those photo viewers, and in one, my mother apparently posed against a beachfront photo, so she seems to be in a tropical paradise. But perhaps she was only in midtown Manhattan.

In 1955, and 14 y/o, I lived on Miami Beach. I slugged up and down the beaches taking "telescope" pictures of the people sitting on the beach, on their blankets. I used a Kodak "Pony" 828. My little business was profitable (for a youngster). It went well until the lifeguard took note. He, in his immensity, banned me from the beach. I didn't understand, bc others purveying popsicles and cold drinks, were clearly allowed to do business. I only conclude, he wanted a "cut" of the slim profits. Early lesson, we'll taught.

Ms. Dwyer, enjoyed your article and perspectives on how much travel and souvenir photography has changed! You captured key chain viewer's allure to anyone that has ever seen their own image inside a viewer....it was all you were looking at for that moment, and would bring back memories with just a single yet vibrant backlit image on color slide film. In fairness however I must admit my view is quite biased. In 1983 I took over a small family manufacturing company from my grandparents. Our best selling product throughout the 80's & 90's- the key chain viewer.

Great writing, Ms. Dwyer! (and yes, I had a bunch of those keychains when I was a kid. Sadly none of them survived...)

Nothing wrong with nostalgia and sentimentality. Thank you for showing what is right about it.

I love this essay. Astute and thought-provoking.

I really enjoyed reading this, thank you. Just wonderful.

Twelve hundred miles away, somewhere in my mother’s home in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, is a green plastic souvenir photo viewer. I’ve not stared into it in many, many years. I can describe exactly what it holds: a picture of my mother and I standing beside one another in the late 1960s at the Concord hotel in the Catskills. We‘re posed at the bottom of a Googie-like, Morris Lapidus staircase. We’re dressed for dinner and are the opposite of sloppy. We’re put together — I’m wearing white bucks, my mother’s working it. We’re dressed up, formal, and young. My mother is about 35 and I’m not yet a teenager. It’s late Johnson or early Nixon, a half-century back. If sociologists say the Catskills were ending, we didn’t have a clue. It turned out, our nuclear family was barely intact, and we two were on a mother-and-son weekend away ”in the mountains,” without my father, my older twin brothers or, as it would later turn out, my mother’s lover. But my mother must have wanted a memento, something to remember the weekend by — and maybe applaud her parenting prowess. It was never used as a keychain. Home to New Jersey that souvenir went, and there it stayed, probably in her night table drawer lo the decades hence. And later, off to Florida’s Treasure Coast. Relocated. Packed. Someday, no doubt, I’ll hold that piece of Great Society plastic again. The Proustian memory hole also works in reverse.

Well done article on viewer keychains. In Ocean City, MD they are college students walking the beach and taking photos in hopes you will take your ticket to the photo building and buy prints, a CD or any of the various trinkets featuring you or your family and one of which is a viewer keychain. I had only seen one of these (it was of my mother) up until my mid-20’s when I went to Ocean City for the first time. My mother-in-law still buys them every year and they calm them scopes.

My grandfather was an amateur photographer & inspired me to become a photographer too. I inherited many cases of his slides, all neatly organized & properly labeled. My favorite images were the ones he took on a vacation with my grandmother in Hawaii.... looking thru these handfuls of slides I was able to see how he saw things & connect with him on an entirely new level, even though he’s been gone for many years....and I laughed at his food images- taken decades before Instagram.

What a lovely essay. I can relate. Some time in the late 1970s, when many of the Catskills resorts were well past their prime, my family stayed for a couple of nights at Grossinger's. Sure enough, we posed for a photographer just as Ms. Dwyer describes, and we were rewarded with one of those plastic photo viewers. For years, my grandparents, who lived on the opposite side of the country from me, kept the Grossinger's souvenir on an end table in their home. Every time I visited, one of the first things I would do when I plopped down on the couch was to pick up the viewer and peer into the past to see an image of a nice Jewish family enjoying the end of an era in upstate New York. Oh, what memories!

I really enjoyed this, Ms. Dwyer. My parents left a few of these behind that I have in a drawer somewhere and you've described the experience beautifully. The feeling of peeking in reminds me of calling up the past in a similar way that Proust described in his remembrances. I only thought about that after reading your piece so thanks for that.