Archives Within the Archive
At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds - Holly Lee
1. Holly’s literary background and her circle of friends
2. Printmaking and her early works
3. Her years of photo-text projects
4. The beginnings of our studio practice
5. Contact prints as a record of an artist’s daily life
6. Photo albums as personal archives
In his poem “Leafing Through Wingo and Holly’s Photo Albums,” written in 1984, Leung Ping-kwan recalled an evening when he, Betty, and a group of friends visited our home. “I’ve been leafing through your albums the whole evening / I never thought you had captured so many moments: the first / poetry and painting exhibition we did together,” he wrote, and observed, “You, in your own way, have recorded history in your family albums.”
Those early photo albums served much the same purpose as today’s ARCHIVE, though in a far simpler form. Alongside family portraits and casual snapshots, we inserted all kinds of materials: small artifacts, newspaper reviews of our exhibitions, studio photographs, and occasional documents related to our work. Some albums contain pages from the exhibition brochures of the Graphic Art Association (版畫會), for which I wrote the preface and introduction, in form of a piece of creative work. Others preserve collections of Polaroids from commercial assignments—test shots of assistants, friends, or ourselves standing in for the model while we adjusted the lighting and composition before the actual session began.
In total, we assembled around twenty albums. Most measure approximately 12 × 12 inches, though each varies slightly in size and format. Together they form an abbreviated pictorial journal of our early years. By the mid-1980s, however, the albums came to an end. Family photographs continued to accumulate, but they found their way into shoeboxes rather than albums. Maps, tickets, and mementos from our travels were tucked into paper bags and envelopes. As the studio became busier with increasingly demanding assignments and new projects occupied our thoughts, life simply outgrew the patient rhythm that making albums once required.
To conclude this section, I have selected a number of pages from those early albums. They are presented alongside the closing part, a reprint of Ping-kwan’s poem “Leafing Through Wingo and Holly’s Photo Albums” (看李家昇黃楚喬照片冊有感): first, the original Chinese version published in Qiu Ying Shi Kan (1986), and then the English translation of his later revised version, included in his bilingual collection Travelled with a Bitter Melon: Selected Poems, 1973–1998. The cover image for that volume was one I created for Ping-kwan.
Albums were simply a way of keeping moments together. They have become an archive before the archive—a quiet record of friendships, beginnings, everyday life, and the many small histories that would later shape everything that followed.