On 16x22 I just dove into this little project, part of getting chops back to make Blurb books. I was looking through a couple of bins of uncurated photographs collected over the last 15 or so years, and today I picked up and scanned the photographs in this unassuming cardboard cover, which holds a set of mysteries for the forensic-minded collector of Abandoned Ancestors.

That would be me. Scanning and then tweaking the images in Lightroom, I began to be familiar with the cast of characters, but am befuddled by some things about the album. For one thing, the images are pasted in seemingly at random (and below I've grouped them as I saw fit, to try to wring some sort of coherent Story from the jumble).

Who knows how to read such documents?

Here's the evidence, such as it is, and subject of course to
augmentation, correction, reorientation, etc. as usual.

I'm just getting started and would be happy to have collaborators in
constructing the Narrative for this album.

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Is this the compiler of the album?

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She appears in some of the stoop series, and perhaps she was the photographer for others

I can't decide if this is family or some mix of friends and family.
There's a complex dynamic in the right-hand threesome
mother and two sister daughters? Nobody seems very pleased...

This series is surely on the same stoop. Three seem centered on the girl in the front, who might be Under Nurses's Care:

And what's the symbolism of this arrangement? Farewell? or something more complicated?
The lady on the left is directly engaging the photographer

and now I'm quite confused. Same stoop. A rabbit about to be made an example of:

and this is from a different planet altogether, some Event that
drew family people out into the cold for a photograph:

but who are they? why are they in the album? hafta make up your own story...

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This pair I've always thought of as the "nothing spells lovin' like something from the coven" photographs

the second is truly one of the GREAT images. Sorority event around Hallowe'en?

I can't see any overlap of people from the stoop set.

and then another change of pace, documenting a child freezing under a tree:

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the cyanotypes are a whole other thing, wanting informed decoding,
and clearly depicting the world of men .

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And that's where this one ends for now.