Do you know there is a history to the photographic school yearbooks for graduation? George K. Warren (1832–1884) was an early American photographer working and living in Boston when the daguerreotype fell out of fashion. So he turned to a different photographic technology and capitalized on the ability of a single negative to produce multiple pictures, which is how yearbooks started.

After his discovery, George K. Warren persuaded college students to buy many images and share them with each other. Then the students would have the images bound by a bookbinder into fancy albums, sometimes with embossed covers and gilded pages creating what we know now as “school yearbooks.” George K. Warren was one of the best-known makers of “graduating class pictures” or school yearbooks for about fifteen years. The National Museum of American History has an early 1860 Warren yearbook, from Rutgers in New Jersey.

Different photographic technologies offered different ways of recording school moments. Professional photographers created formal individual portraits, recorded entire classes, and documented extracurricular clubs and societies. Local amateurs captured rural groups. And after that, snapshots by family members covered various educational rites of passage and the less formal side of school groups. This is how school yearbooks became what they are today.

Now we have 3D yearsbooks! At Yearbook Life,  graphic designers and yearbook publishers, we are able to transform standard, two-dimensional yearbooks into 3-D yearbooks. Read more about our 3D yearbooks at Yearbook Life.com.