The exhibition I Didn’t Want to Show Them, But I couldn’t Help but Show Them presents Jasenko Rasol’s photo albums recorded and bound over the past 28 years. The content of the album is exactly what we expect, photos from family life. But the objects themselves, the albums are certainly no longer something we expect to see or encounter at all. They were first replaced by shoe boxes and then by various types of digital memory storages. Photography has that inclination or a need to be stored. This says something about its nature, durability, time category and the different times we store. We know from our own experience that most of the saved photos are generally not reviewed over and over again. They are recorded, they are stored, we have them, but we mostly handle them from our own memory.

So why are we taking a collection of family albums out of their physical repository right now?

As we live a large part of our lives in times of crisis, we’ve learned that when there are cataclysmic moments, there are always photographs in those few bags among necessities to save. Without photographs we have no memory, past or its proof, someone says that we do not have a preserved identity, without photographs places and events, people and communities are lost. The moment we live in several simultaneous disasters seems to be the ideal time to take the albums out of the repository and get back to ourselves consciously and carefully, regardless of the social isolation we are constrained to.