These handmade books are an exploration of my own family archive. Last summer my mom and I started the laborious process of organizing our family’s entire archive of snapshots, professional family photos, and school pictures. We planned to catalog each photo by date and event, digitize them, and create photo books online for my older sister and I to have. This process would prove to be much more difficult and time consuming than we anticipated, and scattered piles of photos still reside on the folding tables in the hallway. The importance of this endeavor and its eventual completion got me thinking about the ways in which family photos could be organized and presented to enjoy in the present and for posterity.

     I dug into our disordered family archive to explore my own narrower interpretation of the ways our photos could be organized. The images I chose from our collection, like school pictures, Polaroids taken at the dentist, and scans from high school yearbooks show my interest in connections between family members, growth, and the passage of time. Family photos have a long history of being presented in album formats, so I explored bookmaking to push the idea of what a family album could mean. My personalized, tactile, and interconnected books become slices of a larger family archive that may reveal more than a traditional family album could.