While Isao's albums are largely chronological, they also create a version of Yajima family life that is distilled through concentrating on certain spaces. Aside from the touchable, foxed pages of the albums themselves, a viewer of the family albums comes to know their curated life through the time they spent outside the home. On the few occasions when the home was photographed, it was nearly always its threshold spaces of doorstep, window, veranda or garden that were captured to speak for the home as a place the Yajimas were. Isao made this choice consistently across images of both Yajima homes but it was a choice isolated to the home; when the family were staying at hotels or with friends, the inner rooms were eagerly captured as seen in the photograph below from Isao and Eiko's 1961 trip to Atami.


Why are there so few images taken inside the Yajima home? It may have been a question of aesthetic consistency with the outside of the house offering a consistent backdrop. Practically it could have been that the house interior was too dark to get a good photo - but as there are a few photographs taken indoors, we know a hearth snap was not impossible. There may have been a performative element at play, with Isao wanting to be seen outside with his camera. Whatever the motivation behind the choice not to include many images of the home in these albums, the result is that the domestic interior emerges as a subject through its absence. As Isao ran the family dental practice from within the structure of his home for most of his professional life, the invisibility of the domestic space in the albums is not explained by his sustained physical absence. Instead, the invisibility of the home suggests both what Isao thought photography was for and where he thought it should happen. Like most otosan kamerman taking pictures of his family was part of a public performance, rather than a private practice, and most of the pictures Isao took reflected this.

The photo reel below tracks how Isao used threshold spaces across all three albums to speak for his home - often with distinct pride. Looking across them, observe the differences between how and where Isao and Eiko pose; while Isao is always external to the house almost like a sentinel, Eiko is occasionally captured from the inside, looking out - transforming Isao momentarily into a domestic voyeur.

Without a visual grasp on the interior life of the Yajima home, the albums testify to the Yajima home as a material and inhabited space. The pages are sunbleached, curled with the memory of moisture and some images carry sticky fingerprints. While albums are not rooms or passing places between them, the linear stacking of images conjures a feeling of architecture and the movement between inside and out. Isao deftly shows this on an early page in the first album where he pasted three sequential studio portraits of himself in a loose circle around a photograph of the family dental practice.

This is not just a record of ageing and place, but a visual playing out of connections between individuals, space and identity. It is as if the hereditary pull of the family practice took paper form, but Isao was kept somehow at its periphery. As much as the taking of a photograph created a space between subject and photographer, between threshold and beyond, the sticking and cutting of making an album also created a domestic space.