Vivian Wan reimagines the traditional family photo album by getting her grandparents to illustrate over it

Today, Tomorrow was, for photographer Vivian Wan, a photo project that started quite unintentionally — a visual investigation prompted by a “noticeable gap” in her family’s photo albums after 2010. Whilst pursuing a series of portraits to document her grandparents and fill some of these blank pages, the artist stumbled across drawings and scraps of writing scattered across their house: “small glimpses into their emotional state that they wouldn’t have openly shared”, she says.

Vivian started to collect these fragments of her family’s lives together in order to preserve them, in doing so expanding the idea of what a family album could be, all the “textures, emotions and stories” these collections could hold. “As I went through the albums, I noticed something striking – some photos had been torn, figures removed, text scratched out, and entire pages missing,” Vivian says. “I became fascinated by the missing identities of these absent subjects, though I was never able to uncover their stories. This led me to reflect on the fragility and evolving nature of our memories.”

To be placed in amongst her additions of found notes, list and poems, the photographer asked her grandparents to generate captions for some of the images in the archive, “much like one would for a traditional family album” she says. Instead of just responding with words alone, the pair began to draw directly on to the images, soaking in new colours that added a “deeply personal” and emotional layer to every scene. Intercepted with the photographer’s still life images, portraits and her grandparents poems, a new picture of their past formed — a much more nuanced time capsule of a first generation Chinese immigrant family that “emphasises both their hardships and hopes in the West”.

The resulting series of images and photo-illustrations pose questions for our personal archives: If photo albums serve as heavily curated, or simplified narratives of our lives, how can we make them feel more true to our experiences? How can their contents be reworked or evolved over time, to reflect our changing memories? The process of this Today, Tomorrow resonated with Vivian’s familial experiences as first generation immigrants “where memories are imbued with both nostalgia and unspoken complexities”, she explains. “Emotional nuances are often left unsaid in immigrant households, further emphasising the weight of these visual records.”

Having tasked herself with creating a more emotive exploration of static images through a range of media, Vivian aimed to highlight an often forgotten complexity of the immigrant experience, or, in her words, “the delicate balance between holding onto cultural roots and adapting to a new environment”. The close collaboration with her grandparents also revealed another layer to preserving family memories: a chance to open up a dialogue between generations. “At its core the project is a tribute to my grandparents journey,” ends Vivian, “an invitation for others to reflect on the evolving narratives of migration, belonging, and generational connection.”