A family album becomes more honest when it leaves room for ordinary untidy days.

Albums are edited by default, and the edit runs towards occasions: weddings, holidays, everyone facing the camera. What gets left out is nearly all of the actual life, which happened on Tuesdays in bad light with the kitchen a mess. Years later the edited version can make your own past look like somebody else’s, because you cannot find yourself in it. The untidy pictures are the ones that turn out to hold the texture.

Keep a few photographs you would normally delete. The unmade bed, the half-finished project, the ordinary face. Print one and put it somewhere visible.