My mother was the family documentarian. My sisters and I would wait with the sun blaring into our eyes while she took her time getting all the settings right on her Nikon FM. There were trips to the Florida Keys and to the Petrified Forest. Countless visits to the Grand Canyon, the Very Large Array observatory in southern New Mexico, and San Diego. And up the California 1.
After a year, or even just a long road trip, she would disappear into her office to work on her typewriter, sometimes venting frustrations when she had to wite-out a typo. As a child I was too busy running around wild to see the true value in what she was creating—her scrapbooks. Years later as an adult I would revisit those numerous scrapbooks she made, and like a flash my childhood would come back to me, with all of its minute detail, the warmth and that wander.
Those scrapbooks are the closest thing I have to a time machine, and with my own scrapbook project (now six years strong) I want to carry on the family tradition. With each year I make a new scrapbook representing the encounters I have with both humans and regions of land. Here’s my visual poem for the year past.
