A divorced Long Island couple decided to share custody of their kids, but they ran into a diagreement over who got the family albums.

There is little doubt that the Family Album is a contested territory. It does not only represent the conditions of history, heritage, and family. Instead it does a lot more: It provides physical evidence of an existence of terms and conditions that supersede both temporally and in significance the owner. One can find a lot of information in family albums. Birth and death dates - hard facts, but also facts that are softer - more fleeting.

I have always mistrusted family albums. Perhaps because I never had some of my own. It was in a time of bereavement really that I started thinking not about the lack of family albums. A lack of something - especially as cumbersome as a family album as I had in my mind really is a curious thing. Normally it is the presence that creates problems. As with every physical thing, the presence of a family album is normally what creates the tensions. It needs to be kept in a reasonable state. It normally holds its own room for upkeeping. Whilst never consulted - quite like an encyclopaedia, it demands respect and space, when in fact it sees little use. In my case the presence was not an issue - the absence was. Not having a family album meant that I was lacking these conditions of stability, that only a (semi- and therefore flawed) history could allow. Whilst I had a pretty good idea as to what I did not have, the very context of the family album allowed little room to things I could have. Things either too complex to photograph, or too menial to take into account when they confronted us in the form of photographs that were arranged almost always chronologically.

I set to make a family album knowing not fully what would be in it. As I found asking relatives for pictures, it became apparent that I could never possess them - not in a sense that could ever constitute a family album as I had in my mind. The relatives wanted these fragile things back. There is of course an innate sense of nostalgia in this reconstruction. Like another Frankenstein, I am attempting to construct a forced meaning from disparate resources. A monstrosity. Curiously there are two notions of history that apply to personal histories - especially those ones of loss. In the Classical World, Loss was marked by three rivers. Acheron - the river of Woe, Styx - the river of unbreakable oaths and Lethe - The river of Forgetfulness.

This reconstruction of a family album from the memories of others seems to me to be a child of that third river. Our forgetful nature seems to be at play when we find ourselves looking at images that have existed before us. Before we could remember them. The fragility of the photograph testifies towards a physical fragility as well, but it is the personal histories that when mined testify to a fragility of memory. Forgetfulness.

I tend not to think of this family album as an epitaph of sorts. Epitaphs usually testify to the things that should not be forgotten. The most successful epitaphs are a calling for memory. This project is quite the contrary. I call for small pauses of forgetfulness.

When making this new family album, the starting point was a family emergency – a death in the family. An absence. Looking at the collections of fragments of the memories of others, I cannot help but think that there is yet another subject matter in these ruins. A nod to the fragility of memory and the nature of photographs. Things that exist and persist that are found in the damage of an almost perfect mirror.