Album space, album time
Albums are foremost a curated space, rather than an accurate archive. In his albums, Isao played with linear time to create album time. This temporality was more concerned with externalising individual sequences of memory for the future than faithfully reconstructing the order of the photographed past. On one page, early in his first album, Isao pastes three sequential studio portraits of himself in a loose circle around a photograph of the family Dental Practice. This is not just a record of ageing and place, but a visual playing out of connections between individuals, space and identity. It is as if the hereditary pull of the family practice took paper form, but Isao was kept somehow at its periphery.
Unbeholden to chronology and playing by its own spatial rules, the album emerges as an “intimate space” and, as Jie Li has written of such spaces in her ethnohistory of her family’s multigenerational alleyway home in Shanghai, history does “not proceed cleanly, with each new era purging the bygone era, but rather accrue[s] into rich sediments of personal memories” (Li 2015, 2-3). The images within the albums appear – much as Li describes – as sediments, rather than clean chronological accounts of places been to and faces seen.
Turning the pages of the Yajima albums, loose and duplicate prints tumble out. This suggests that the album was not the only spaces these images were part of.
