“If you could go back in time and were given a camera, what would you want to capture?” 

I asked my mom this recently, after learning that her family couldn’t afford a camera growing up. It answered my original question, which was why I had seen and heard so little about her life before my brother and I were born. My mom comes from a family of 7 children, in a culture where the expression of difficult emotions was often taboo. All this amounted to very little archives from which she can recall her youth – both in images and in stories she got told.

What I felt was lacking in my mom’s archives, and her briefly youthful years, I am now privileged enough to experience in abundance. By intertwining my mom’s archives and my own photographs, I interpret her responses and reflections on our relationship – using photography as the language for a conversation between our lives and experiences. 

The book format is a direct reference to the budget books my mom used to meticulously keep track of her expenses – a habit she began after moving to a new city to build a new life with my dad, and carried into my childhood. Her choices of the most colorful books for such a mundane and private subject matter always intrigued me. The images here play on this contrast by using private matters to confront unspoken feelings of guilt openly.