toy camera:

Following World War II, Ben and Harry Cooper founded Cooper’s Camera Mart in Baltimore. When Ben’s daughter, Martha, was three years old, Cooper gave her a Baby Brownie. On the weekends, he would bring her on outings sponsored by the Baltimore Camera Club. When his daughter became competent with one camera, he would give her a more advanced model.

Following college, Martha Cooper became a photojournalist. Her early pieces documented the work of Horibun I, a traditional Japanese tattooist, and the burgeoning graffiti scene in New York City. In the decades since, Cooper’s photographs have appeared in “National Geographic,” “Smithsonian,” and “Natural History” magazines, and have been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Urban Nation in Berlin, among others.

In the 1970s, Cooper also began a photographica collection with a focus on women with cameras and Kodak advertising. The collection also included postcards, valentines, snapshots, doll cameras, figures, wind-ups, play cameras, and figurines.

Travelers have long collected mementos. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams carved slivers of wood off a chair in Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1700s. Beachgoers in Massachusetts pocketed chunks of Plymouth Rock so often that a local grocer kept a hammer and chisel on hand for visitors. During the 1876 American centennial, tourists snipped fabric from the White House curtains. At the end of the 19th century, mass-market souvenirs became alternatives to these sneaky tactics. And by the end of the 20th century, tourists around the world imported keepsakes and mass-produced souvenirs were a global industry.