Returning to The Family Album
This one-day workshop invites participants to gather and write about or alongside family photographs — a specific set of images from family albums that you wish to spend time with. Through readings, prompts, and shared writing time, we’ll explore different ways of entering a photograph.
December 7, 2025
Sunday, 12:00 pm-3:00 pm EST; Online
$65 USD
Open to all ages and levels; may or may not be professional artists or writers.
This 3-hour workshop invites participants to gather and write about or alongside family photographs—a small selection of images or subarchive of your choice from family albums that you wish to spend time with.
Through readings, guided prompts, and collective writing time, we’ll explore different ways of entering a photograph—through memory and nostalgia, absence and grief, grammar and aesthetic, personal and collective histories, fiction and speculation, research and restoration, political and social contexts, or simply as a way of staying related to someone within the photograph.
The session begins with a short lecture and discussion, followed by two focused 45-minute writing periods separated by a brief break, and concludes with some reflective time together. Participants are free to write in any form—poetry, letters, essays, notes, as research, or to inspire making a new artwork. This workshop emphasizes process over product; nothing will be shared or critiqued.
This workshop is an invitation to return, unceremoniously but persistently, to look again pay attention to a few photographs that ritualize remembering and writing, amidst so many others that constantly demand our time.
Register below.
Payment options are also available through PayPal (cherylmukherji@gmail.com)
For any questions or assistance, please contact: cherylmukherji@gmail.com
Spread from "Hidden Mother" by Laura Larson. Saint Lucy Press, 2017.
"Figure (2001)" by Glen Ligon, which inspired the poem “50 Lines after Figure (2001) by Glenn Ligon” by Tiana Clark, as part of Poetry Project, MoMA, 2021.
"Nox" by Anne Carson, a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out “book in a box.” Composed using snippets of text, photographs, and drawings from her journal, Carson presents an intensely personal tribute to a brother she barely knew.
Spread from "Hidden Mother" by Laura Larson. Saint Lucy Press, 2017.
"On a Clear Day" by Victoria Chang in proper layout inspired by one of the screenprints in Agnes Martin’s series of the same name, as part of Poetry Project, MoMA, 2021.
The vernacular archive that inspired "Listening to Images" by Tina M. Campt.
Roland Barthes' "Mourning Diary", which he wrote on notecards after the passing of her mother. Translation: "Never again, never again!”—And yet there’s a contradiction: “never again” isn’t eternal, since you yourself will die one day. “Never again” is the expression of an immortal.
A page from Sally Mann’s notebook, circa 1973 © Sally Mann.
"Life is Elsewhere" by Sohrab Hura, 2015.
"I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone" by Richard Brautigan from Revenge of the Lawn, 1971.
Who might this benefit?
Individuals interested in exploring personal family archives and writing about them as a practice in returning and remembering.
Individuals looking to catalogue and reflect on family photographs—both personally and professionally.
Individuals interested in working with family archives, memory, or personal history in their art or writing practice.
Artists who use photography, text, or storytelling as part of their visual or conceptual practice.
Individuals seeking a dedicated space of quiet focus and collective accountability to begin or continue writing about their family photographs.
Individuals who wish to think about their images through form, language, context, history, aesthetic, fiction.
Anyone drawn to the family album as a living space of relation, inspiration, imagination, and return.
No prior writing experience is required. All mediums and levels of practice are welcome.