Between Pages and Time: Memory in Family Archives
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Photobook Corner — Between Pages and Time: Memory in Family Archives
For this Photobook Corner curated by photographer Kurt Tong, we present a selection of eight photobooks that center on the family archive—not merely as a collection of images, but as a powerful site of memory, reflection, and sometimes disruption. These works are united by their exploration of how personal histories intersect with larger social and historical narratives, particularly in the contexts of trauma, absence, and remembrance.
Photobooks offer a unique medium for this exploration. Their tangible form—the slow turning of pages, the deliberate sequencing, and the layering of images and text—mirrors the nonlinear, often fragmented nature of memory itself. Through the family archive, these artists confront personal trauma: experiences of loss, migration, and rupture that reverberate across generations. Some works take a quiet, poetic approach, while others adopt a more confrontational stance, challenging historical amnesia and inherited silences.
Several photobooks in this collection blend family photographs with found materials, ephemera, or newly created imagery, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction. This approach expands the possibilities of storytelling and reimagines what an archive can be—especially when official histories exclude or erase certain voices. Whether addressing war, displacement, colonial legacies, or hidden familial truths, these works resist viewing the archive as static or purely nostalgic. At the same time, some books offer a more meditative experience, focusing on remembrance in its simplest and most intimate form. They honor the act of holding on—of arranging fragments into meaning, and of assembling the past into something tangible that invites ongoing reflection.
As you engage with these eight photobooks, we invite you to consider the diverse formal and emotional strategies the artists employ, and how the photobook format shapes our experience of memory. What does it mean to hold a family’s history in your hands? How do these artists navigate the balance between the personal and the political? And how might the photobook help us confront not only what is remembered, but also what has been forgotten?
About the Speaker: Kurt Tong
Born in Hong Kong in 1977, Kurt gained his Masters in Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication in 2006. His personal projects explore his Chinese roots and understanding his motherland.
The Queen, The Chairman and I is a multi-layered narrative book dealing with the story of Hong Kong of the last 100 years and the Asian Diaspora through the lives of his own family. The project has been exhibited across four continents and was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2019. Combing for Ice and Jade, a love letter to the artist’s nanny, one of the few remaining self-combed women in the world, has won numerous awards and has been shown at the Himalayas Museum in Shanghai, Finnish Museum of Photography and Rencontres d’Arles, amongst others. A monograph was published by Jiazazhi Press in 2019 and was named one of best Photobooks of 2019 by Time, El País, Esquire amongst others. In 2022, he was awarded the prestige Prix Elysee and released Dear Franklin, an epistolary novel about a tragic love story during WWII in China. Co-published by Atelier EXB and Photo Elysee, it was named one of the best photo books of 2022 by MOMA New York and awarded the “Best Published book” at the Singapore International Photography Festival in 2024. In 2024, he published “Krampus”, a book about the Alpine Christmas monster with Fotohof and launched the accompanying multi-sensory exhibition alongside a concert in Innsbruck, Austria.
