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I have received and written the text that will accompany my book today:

Introduction by Laura Parkinson

“Photo Album” is a photographic study of the changing attitudes towards printed photographic memories and the way in which we treat them. Back when I was a young girl, my parents stored most of my early years of childhood in a tin; the same tin I share with my sister 18 years later, rarely looking at them. However, milestones throughout my life; first steps, first school photograph, etc, were placed in my parents purses or wallets and looked at on a daily basis until they were so engrained on the mind they didn’t notice them. I gathered together a group of people for my photographic study, who all knew each other through being related, being friends or meeting each other on at least one occasion, and asked them to delve deep into their photo albums to produce a photograph of a loved one. This naturally produced a circle, the first person linking to the last.

I have always been fascinated by the idea of digital memories. They can be looked at on a vast scale, but lost so quickly. Digital memories are vunerable, and although people can argue that printed memories are vunerable to the elements of fire, water, air and nature, I feel that printed memories can be treasured and looked after, unlike those that are digital. We carry around archives of memories in our pockets, in the form of phone and laptops, and in an instant, technology can let us down or we can lose that archive. I asked my subjects to carry around their printed photograph for a week in their handbags or wallets, and then I would photographically assess the damage caused. 

Foreword by Samuel Andrew Fenton

Photographs. Even the definition of what a photograph is has changed throughout the years. We used to have to consider whether we wanted glossy or matte, well now it’s JPEG or TIFF. Nobody prints their photographs anymore, choosing instead to store them digitally, and forget about them. What has remained, however, is not what a photograph is, but what what a photograph is of - a memory. A moment in time captured in a still format, preserved forever. It doesn’t matter if they’re stored in a print-based photographic album, or a folder on a desktop called ‘untitled_1’, everybody seems keen to want to keep their photographs in the highest quality possible, whether it be in terms of megapixels, or frayed edges. Does it matter if the preservation is immaculate? I say no. 

A memory in our mind fades, and changes shape, with every passing day, so why should a photographic preservation of such a memory be any different? To think back to our childhood, our favourite teddy wasn’t the bear which smelled of the store it was bought from, with all tags crisply unfolded, it was the tatty ball of fluff, unrecognisable to the onlooker as ever having been shaped like a woodland creature... A photograph carrying a pristine veneer suggests that there has been a certain application of consideration, whereas a tatty photo enforces love, in its simplest form.

And that’s the very concept being explored in this book; the idea that a photographic memory shouldn’t be locked away and kept immaculate, as the point of a photograph is to be looked at, otherwise the eyelid need have been the only shutter to have opened in an act of gathering light. A physical recollection of an event allows for more than merely a thought, or a remembrance, it allows for us to fully embrace a visual representation of a moment from the past. Whether it is of a place we like, or a person we love, we should cherish it, not store it. 

A group of people had been selected to carry a photograph around, of someone they care for, for seven days. The brief was not to wrap the photograph in an impenetrable package, and guard it for dear life, but to simply carry the photograph. Whether it be by folding it up to fit into a wallet, rolling it and popping it in their pocket, or merely leaving it in their bag, it was to be carried naturally, very similar to how our minds carry a memory. After all, that’s what a photograph is, a memory, so it would be almost without purpose to treat it as anything else. To define a memory, I would say that it is a moment in time that has been ingrained on our minds, indefinitely, yet with imperfections. A photograph is a memory, so why need it be any different?