We tend to treat photographs as reliable forms of evidence, and albums as ordered documents of life. Christina Leslie's exhibition The Album includes a growing photo series that approaches her family archive as a sourcebook: images that open a life to a fuller understanding. Yet every archive is uniquely shaped by the context of the world around it. What happens when a sourcebook is shaped by absence as much as presence?  

Leslie’s mother, born in Canada in 1950, has had her life documented from infancy into adulthood. Her father, born the same year in Morant Bay, Jamaica, has only two known childhood photographs. The artist leverages this contrast to raise questions about how memories are carried forward, showing the archive as dependent on equitable access to photography. 

Leslie’s most recent works are rephotographed images of her parents’ wedding day, blurred using a handmade pinhole lens to visualize the slippery nature of memory, while preserving the context and distinct colour cast of the 1980s. Celebrating the union of her parents’ families, the suite shows moments of warmth set apart from a public life shaped by unease. 

As photographs, recorded conversations, and video works come together to supplement her archive, documentation gives way to differing family recollections. Throughout the exhibition, the artist confronts the desires and limits of an incomplete archive, thinking about how collective forms of remembrance can supplement absences and variances.  

Artwork courtesy of the artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery. Exhibition documentation by LF Documentation.