This experimental publication explores the potential of found images, mementos, and ephemera to serve as the basis for visual research and narrative building. The project started from a set of old postcards, photographs, and handwritten notes purchased from a thrift store in Tallinn between December 2018 and March 2019, when I realized most of them were related to the story of a single family. The various traces of evidence, interrelated meanings, objects, names, places, and their histories suggested many possible directions to explore further through photography and rephotography. This handmade book is an archive, a fragmented narrative that emerged while processing the findings and discovering a few random facts along the way. While these supported the research, in its totality the work is not a factual examination of the past, but quite freely based on assumptions, stereotypes, and projections; it remains open to multiple interpretations.

What struck me was how these collections of objects—personal belongings, kitchen utensils, appliances and, above all, the postcards themselves, once without a doubt important to their owners, were now being discarded. However, it was also possible to acquire them again, transform and reinterpret them, as to give them new meaning and purpose. One could call it an anti-documentary approach, as I was experimenting with how much of my subject’s story could be reconstructed without access, without permission, without being intrusive, without getting closer, without contact. I was sustained by how much I could find out, how close I could get, the places and the distances the story could go and in the unreliable, self-revealing and unexpected ways it did so. What was allowed and acceptable to appropriate? What were the unspoken rules of engagement? When was it time to stop? A publication that documents the life of a stranger from as distant a position as possible, it was rather a method of research that helped me process and integrate emotions, experiences and memories of my own.