‘Someone worked long and hard on this album,’ writes photography collector Roz Leibowitz. ‘It spans the years 1917-1941 and contains snapshots from each year’s family vacation. The hand-decorated page layouts are most extraordinary.’
If Swiss soothsayer and artist Emma Kunz made her own family album it’d look like this. The time taken to produce these intricate designs in an old family album bought on eBay suggests the work was rooted in love.
We’d like to know more of the people in the pictures. If you recognise anyone, please get in touch. Is that being nosey? Once people know the names of the faces in these photographs. Can it be that nobody on the planet earth knows who they are, or who make this lovely album? No one who remembers where they were, who they kissed, what made them laugh, where they worked, who they went to school with and what they looked forward to? Did they keep a diary? Lives don’t vanish. People leave echoes. Whoever kept this album knew that and wanted it. If photography imprisons reality, as Susan Sontag wrote, does knowing the story behind the image free the captives?
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