As a young adult, Lukasik set out to fill in the gaps in the family album by researching her genealogy - and what she discovered rocked not only her relationship with her mother, but also her fundamental sense of identity. Raised in an all-white, working class suburb of Cleveland, Lukasik had never thought of her parents, who described their ancestry as German and Bohemian on her father’s side and French and Scottish on her mother’s side, as anything but Caucasian. “If your family has been in this country a long time, there's some secrets in your closet that you don't know about.” “I'll tell you one thing,” she says in The Secret Album, a new short film directed by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason for the Garage by HP’s History of Memory project about how printed photographs are sentinels of family history.

“When I used to ask her about that she’d say, ‘Oh I just don’t have any,’ which I thought was strange.” Her mother’s guardedness about her own family’s origins were yet another layer to their already complex relationship. “I felt very close to my mother, but she had a certain mystery,” she says.

In the stack of family photo albums, there were only a handful of black-and-white prints of relatives from New Orleans, where her mother, Alvera (Frederic) Kalina, had lived in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Growing up in suburban Ohio, Lukasik puzzled over why there were so few pictures of her mother’s side of the family. This is true for author Gail Lukasik, who was just as captivated by what was left out of her parents’ snapshots as by the faces and stories they portrayed. We treasure family photos not only because they illuminate the past, but also because they can offer up an alternative narrative to the stories we tell - and retell - about our identities. The Secret Album is part of HP's original documentary project, History of Memory, which celebrates the power of printed photos.

Alvera frederic