Alone in the cluttered spare bedroom of my mother’s apartment in Japan, I found myself surrounded by the accumulated contents of our family’s life. There were towers of boxes, and stacks of books, piles of old clothes and miscellaneous household items – the residue of decades that no one had been able to sort through. My sister had died unexpectedly years earlier; my father, too, was gone. So I had flown back to Japan from the United States to help my mother, who had been hospitalised after breaking her hip and had also begun a slow descent into dementia. In the apartment, I spotted a moving box with the words ‘Sawa’s Albums’ written on the outside. When I recognised my mother’s handwriting, I broke down in tears.
Inside the box were hundreds of photographs of my sister and me. They were the product of my parents’ sustained and deliberate labour, beginning in the mid-1960s, when taking pictures still required skill and expense. My father, an avid amateur photographer, kept a meticulous visual record of our growth, which my mother arranged into 14 neatly organised and captioned albums.
These albums depict the family life my parents worked hard to build: my sister and me on the beach with packed bento lunches, standing stiffly in our new clothes in front of our old house on the first day of school, and smiling on the steps of a Shinto shrine on New Year’s Day. As children, we would pull out the albums time and again, telling and retelling to ourselves the stories of our family.
Now, decades later, I flipped through our childhood albums alone. Black-and-white photographs gave way to faded colour prints. In the early years, they were accompanied by my mother’s delicate handwriting, naming dates and places; later, her captions were replaced by my childish writing, then by my cheeky teenage annotations. I immersed myself in the faces and stories I remembered from childhood.
At first, the experience felt like a return to something intimately familiar. Gradually, something else emerged. Something harder to name. As I turned the pages, I felt faint but persistent prickles of unease. I wanted to understand where that unease came from.
The first thing I noticed was who appeared in these photographs – and, later, who did not. In my first year, I was often pictured with my mother. But she appeared mostly as an ever-present caretaker at the periphery: photographs showed her hands steadying me from behind or her skirt at the edge of the frame. My mother’s presence lessened over the next few years, and I was increasingly captured in action – walking, running, playing or climbing trees – by myself or with my childhood friends. My sister was born when I was four and, from that point, photographs showed the two of us together. Throughout these years, my father largely remained behind the camera, except in a few snapshots taken by family friends.
Then I began to wonder: where were the pictures of all four of us together? I went through the albums in the box once more and found none.
Even the structure of the albums reflected a certain separation – each of us had our own and there was no shared family album
There were almost no images of my parents as a married couple, either. I searched the apartment and found a separate collection of my parents’ photographs. Aside from their wedding portraits and a small number of snapshots from their courtship, I found no anniversary pictures, no photos of them from vacation trips or family events. There were no images of them sharing a quiet moment at home. In fact, there was almost no visual record of their togetherness.
Even the structure of the albums reflected a certain separation – each of us had our own, individually named, and there was no shared ‘family album’. When my sister and I were very young, my mother decided which prints went into our separate albums. Once we were old enough, she would let us divide them ourselves. Each album became an individual record of childhood, which also stood in as the shared record of our family history.
Taken together, these absences formed a pattern, made all the more striking by the care and detail that went into documenting our lives. So much had been preserved – outings, milestones, gestures, occasions – that what was omitted became harder to dismiss.
Only later did I recognise that I had begun what the cultural theorist Annette Kuhn calls ‘memory work’: returning to photographs to look carefully at what they show and, just as importantly, at what they do not. ‘A photograph,’ Susan Sontag explains in On Photography (1977), ‘is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.’ Photos record not merely how things looked, but the fact that they existed at all. Family photographs in particular present themselves as visual testimony of lived experience.
But they can also do more than that – sometimes photographs participate in the construction of our memories by making certain relationships and sentiments visible while leaving others in shadow. As I looked into those shadows, the old feelings, which I believed I had long since left behind, came back to me: resentment at my father’s need for control, empathy and frustration toward my mother’s resignation, and the vague but persistent loneliness and fear of abandonment I had carried through childhood.
Our parents’ affection could seem present at one moment and unreachable the next
As I sat with these emotions, my thoughts turned to the deprivations of my parents’ own childhoods. My parents grew up in Tokyo and Yokohama during and immediately after the Second World War. Their family homes, along with most of their possessions, were destroyed during the firebombings in 1945. They came of age in conditions of material scarcity, in households shaped by loss and disruption. There are very few photographs of their early lives; survival left little room for documentation.
By the time they reached adulthood, they faced a different world of expectations. In the postwar period, during the decades of rapid economic growth in Japan, a new middle-class ideal took hold that centred on the nuclear family. Together, my parents built their lives around that ideal. My father became a breadwinner, working long hours outside the home. My mother became a full-time homemaker, responsible for managing the household and raising the children. Photographs of their thriving daughters became a record of their achievement.
My sister and I accepted the family story the albums told when we were young children. By the time we were in our late teens, we had begun to see another side of that story. Sitting at the kitchen table late at night, we often returned to the same insecurity we had held since childhood. We knew that our parents had given us a stable home, a good education, family outings and vacations. At the same time, we couldn’t always feel emotional closeness. Our parents’ affection could seem present at one moment and unreachable the next, and we learned, each in our own way, not to count on it. It seemed as though some forms of intimacy did not have a place in the family my parents knew how to build.
Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘postmemory’ helped me name this inheritance. She describes how the pain or trauma of one generation can reverberate through the lives of the next, even when they haven’t witnessed or experienced the cause. My parents’ childhood years, shaped by war and scarcity, were not memories my sister and I carried. Yet they shaped the family life my parents made for us and the emotional atmosphere in which we grew up.
The abundance and absences in our photo albums tell a layered story of a family built in the aftermath of loss. The photographs preserve the visible signs of recovery – the ordinary pleasures and routines of a stable middle-class family life. But the silences point to what remained harder to repair: things like intimacy and emotional assurance. I knew they cared for me. What puzzled me was whether affection could be felt and depended on between parents and children or between husband and wife, within a family.
What moments are consistently recorded, and which seem to leave no trace?
As an anthropologist, I also see the unmistakable remnants of the older model of the Japanese household in my family photographs. In this model, known as ie, the family functioned less as a site of emotional intimacy than as a unit organised around roles and continuity. Seen through this lens, my parents’ positions – in photographs and life – become more nuanced. My father’s absence from the frame signals distance, but it also reflects his dedication to what he considered his role as head of the household. My mother’s partial or peripheral presence in the images mirrored a life structured around the gendered role of service and support. It was also the visible trace of care that made the rest of us photographable.
These forms of care, however real, did not always become emotionally legible while we were growing up. After my sister died, I carried anger toward my parents that I could not fully explain. Only now, returning to these photographs from this new vantage point, do I begin to see that the anger reached back to something older – the uncertainty my sister and I shared about whether our parents’ affection would be there when we most needed it. I also understand, finally, how hard my parents tried to give us a better start in life than the one they had been given. If they fell short in offering emotional security, I can now see this as something more than failure. It is part of what they had inherited from their own childhoods.
This is what learning to practise ‘memory work’, learning to look carefully at what is or isn’t captured by photographs, has given me: a way to hold together truths about our family that once felt impossible to reconcile. My parents’ real care and emotional distance, the yearnings they pursued and the sacrifices they made, the uncertainty my sister and I shared, my youthful disappointments, and my renewed gratitude for the safe and stable childhood I was given – they are all real, and all deeply human.
For readers who have family photographs of their own, whether preserved in albums or stored on phones, it’s worth asking this: what is difficult to see in those images? Which people are photographed together and which are not? Which relationships appear only indirectly through traces at the edge of the frame? What moments are consistently recorded, and which seem to leave no trace? And how might your own memories – what you felt but could not have named at the time – change the way you observe those images now?
Asking these questions is a way of seeing the photographic records of our lives more carefully. It’s a way of recognising that their silences, as much as their contents, can carry meaning.