In the late 1930s my mother, then a young girl, assembled an album of pictures she had taken on family trips. Each photo is meticulously mounted on black paper above tiny captions written in white ink -- Our Picnic Table, Road Scene On Way Home, Bus Wreck. In later years, when she took pictures, she would throw the developed prints into drawers, loose, left to the hazards of history; but at least once early in life she devoted herself to painstaking efforts of preservation.