Weeks later, I discovered an 8 x 12.5 cm color photograph of my sister as a young girl, aged two, in a clumped stack of other loose photographs—ones that never found a home in an album but still constitute my family archive. The photograph was taken in the garden from our shared childhood 25 years ago, but it is damaged and sticky from neglect now. The emulsion of the print has degraded, coagulated, melted, and spread from the corners, leaving only a two-inch strip in the center untouched. In the center, my sister—out of focus—stands in a formless white frock with a scalloped bib around her neck. One hand is raised and the other midair, about to be held by someone. From the left corner, two thin arms stretch out, extending with open palms toward her. They are frozen in the blur of a swift yet incomplete gesture, captured a second before they hold her. The face of the person reaching out is lost to the rot of the emulsion, reduced to black-and-white streaks in the upper left corner of the print. A half-damaged, vibrant, warmly toned bush grows in the background, and four red bricks line the periphery of the garden. My sister stands looking ahead into the camera with a soft smile, unaware she is about to be held.

As I look at the two photographs and name their parts, it is impossible not to be distracted by the presence of people who are either reduced to a shadow or absorbed by the damage of the photograph. It is the presence of their absence—deliberate or accidental—that holds my intrigue. Who is the shadow photographer in my grandmother’s garden, and who is the person reaching out to hold my sister in ours? I consider these narrative inconsistencies as punctuation in my family albums: a resting place, a forgetfulness—assisted by the passing and damage of time.

Family albums are like manifestos. They are passed down as relics of memory, declaring ideas of selfhood and kinship through a series of photographs: some spontaneous, others painstakingly staged. They reflect the values of a family—harmony, belonging, hierarchy—especially within the structure I grew up in: nuclear, patriarchal, heteronormative, and tightly ordered. This is a Happy Family, devoid of complexity and complications. Each member is named, posed, and assigned a part: father as the head, mother as the nurturer, children growing up and leaving, always leaving. The album records our birthdays, our weddings, our graduations—the evidence of achievement, of joy. It omits what doesn’t fit: mourning, rupture, anything that might fracture the myth of the Happy Family. The roles are rehearsed and repeated, photograph after photograph, until the myth becomes truth. It endures, despite inconsistencies, not because it is true, but because it is idyllic. 

Upon returning to the family album, I am confronted by its arduous, boastful work of memory-making as meaning-making, one photograph at a time. I am also confronted by its quiet inconsistencies, which fail to comfort me upon returning to the family album to desperately believe in the Happy Family. An unidentified shadow photographer, a sticky rot, a figure cut out of a photograph with kitchen scissors—swallowing a person whole from my memory; an album corner orphaned from a photograph lost decades ago; empty pages in the middle of the album, unmarred by the trauma of someone’s passing and the grief of their absence in the pages that follow; the failure to name someone dear from my childhood in a photograph, the failure to stay related to them. It is through these quiet inconsistencies, the family album as a manifesto fails. 

Revisiting the photographs of my grandmother and sister in the garden separated by 50 years, becomes a new gesture. I rename their parts and recall the fringe memories around the instances when the photographs were made. They are prosthetic memories, built entirely upon the surprise of discovering these photographs—their incomplete parts, protagonists, and plots—which did not exist before I chanced upon them.

The photographs are absorbed as part of my life now—squeezed hesitantly into the long chronology of things—naturally, but gradually, developing a future. I mount the two photographs in my kitchen with thumbtacks to the wall above my sink. I like to look at and think about them when I am doing dishes and talk about them to my friends when they visit. 

Sometimes, they tell me about their grandmothers and recall a distant childhood memory with their siblings. We stand an inch from the wall, squinting at lost details and pointing to corners in the photographs that I had previously missed. We compare our lives to the women in the photographs, we imagine them as girls in their childhood gardens. We fantasize about growing our own gardens one day. 

We share this singular thrill of playing serious researchers in a lab—boiling chemicals into fumes—but in the intimacy of our kitchens and photographs. The photograph in this future acts as a hanger for other memories and readings to attach to: factual, grammatical, playful, speculative, and fictional. Their meaning now rests in possibilities, untethered from the chronology of events and the reliability of the narrator.

It is not just the failure of memory (or the family album) but the work of memory itself to push to create other possibilities, driven by curiosity instead of truth. It requires one to momentarily forget how things were or should have been, and to wonder how things could be. It may distract you into a labyrinth, pulling you in, leaving you wandering, discovering what you didn’t previously believe was real. This distraction offers immense freedom—from the failures of memory and the family.

The family album always fails you, the way critics fail artworks, artworks fail archives, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures, there is a reconciliation and return, a consciousness and choice, and with it, the promise of future work—a possible illumination through play, both simple and serious. The family album comes to us with no work of our own, and leaves us to undergo a giant labour, without preparation or the promise of relief.

Why do I return to something, over and over again, that is essentially meant to fail?

In a conversation about gardens as archives, Jamaica Kincaid says to Olivia Laing: There is no way to make a sustainable garden except perhaps in our dreams. The garden itself is an ideal, an idyll, without knowledge of the absence of the ideal… And yet we must strive, for it leads to thinking, which for the most part is a very bad idea, yet so necessary. 

She later adds, For me the garden is a place of incredible disturbance and violation, which I welcome. And why, you ask? It is from disturbance and violation that we get Justice, and I so fervently believe that Justice is a divine aspiration—in fact, Justice is the ultimate form of Love. [1] 

Family albums often do not lead to feasts; they lead to nothing or they lead to work, and not work as an act of self definition or self acclaim but sometimes, work as torture, as hell. But I return, because my family album is the fantastical place where I was celebrated and loved as a child—in the literal and idyllic garden—without consequence or resolution.

In aspiration and anticipation of this Love, I fantasize about working in the family album the way I fantasize about growing a garden one day, spending hours that turn into days, that turn into weeks, that turn into months, on my knees and hands—tending, rooting, uprooting, mixing, potting, loosening, binding, saving, trashing, failing, and propagating new and old possibilities—seasons upon seasons. 

No matter the condition, the work of keeping something alive—be it family albums or gardens—is to return to it, not despite the failures, but because of them.