FAMILY PHOTOS (2018)

The family album is one of the most familiar ways we preserve a life. It records celebrations and ordinary moments, creating a visual history of who belonged to whom. Yet for many Queer people, particularly those who lived in the early twentieth century, this record is incomplete. Their relationships were hidden, misidentified, separated from their context, or left without the language that might allow us to recognize them.

Family Photos gathers historical photographs of Queer people and couples and reimagines them as part of our shared Queer family album. Original black-and-white images are recoloured by hand, bringing immediacy to lives that can otherwise feel distant from our own. The act of adding colour is not intended to modernize or correct the past, but to resist the emotional distance created by historical photography. These people lived in colour. They dressed vibrantly, touched one another, built homes, made jokes, fell in love, and found ways to be known.

Printed at various sizes and assembled like photographs collected across generations, Family Photos ask what it means for Queer people to inherit a history that was rarely preserved as our family history. As Queer people, we find our ancestors in archives, anonymous photographs, coded gestures, and images of people whose stories we may never fully know.