I have been looking at and re-contextualising photographs from my family album, with particular emphasis on the ways in which family members have touched and been touched within the frame of the photograph. As a result, this has highlighted the closeness of some of the family groups and the distance of others through two generations - the family I was brought up with and the one I created. We invest our family albums with a huge importance, yet at the same time, the way in which families are photographed for these albums is limited and institutionalised, showing only times of celebration - e.g. a wedding, a birthday, a holiday. Photographs are taken in a particular way, and this creates an image which is generally accepted as the way we want to represent our families for the next generation and beyond. Documenting a family event may act as a way of distancing oneself from a more ‘genuine’ or truthful reading. Using the notion of the familial gaze to look at the images, I intentionally chose archetypal images that could be part of the photo albums of many white western European families. I am questioning in this work, whether the images can tell any truth about ourselves, our families, and our identities. An important aspect of this work is for the manipulation of the images in the darkroom, by using tissue paper to emphasise specific aspects of the image and to hide others. NB. This has changed massively since digital photography has become the usual way of documenting family occasions. This series is accompanied with a hand-made book that contains sixteen texts that I have written in relation to each image. To make my point that the same image can be read or interpreted in a multiplicity of ways depending on what you know already about the family history, I invite the viewer to read any statement alongside any of the photographs, and to make their own reading or interpretation of the image.