Masha Solus works with a mid-20th-century American family photo album found at a flea market. The album contains around 50 vernacular photographs of an unknown family dating from the 1930s to 1950s.

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Solus meticulously redraws nearly 40 of the images by hand, transforming them into a monumental leporello that extends over 2,500 feet (637 meters) when fully unfolded.

Through this archive, Solus explores themes of memory, female experience, and distance. As a woman, she recognizes familiar gestures of motherhood, domestic life, and family bonds in the photographs, while remaining sharply aware of the unbridgeable gap — this is another person’s life, ultimately unknowable and impossible to fully claim. The work becomes a careful yet inevitably incomplete act of appropriating someone else’s history.

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Combining found photography, drawing, and book arts, the project questions who owns a family’s visual memory once it has been separated from its origins, and to what extent an outsider can offer a meaningful reinterpretation of a personal archive.