The Way We Were

How family photo albums can make history

- JORIAN CHARLTON

LIKE SO MANY Caribbean fathers, my dad tends to be reticent about his past and doesn’t like to reminisce. When I was growing up, he’d often deflect when I asked him questions about his life, and so most of what I know about him are details I’ve learned from his sisters. In 2017, when he gave me these 35mm photographs that he took in Jamaica (where he was born), New York (where he has family), and Toronto (where he eventually moved) throughout the 1970s and ’80s, he handed them to me in this ragged, decomposing camera bag, like they didn’t matter at all. “They’re just pictures,” he said.