Forgotten Sweethearts

I was born and raised in American Samoa, on a rainforest island that’s the third wettest place on Earth. In the constant humidity, mold consumed everything, even photographs. We shipped family photos off-island as soon as they were developed, and my few framed photos bloomed with mold, dissolving beneath a wet film. Watching my family photos decay instilled a love of family albums and an urgency to photograph. Last year, my 91-year-old neighbor died without children, and his family photo albums were tossed in the trash. I rescued them, and Forgotten Sweethearts was born. The project explores memory, erasure, and identity through discarded photographs, blending real and imagined narratives of family and cultural history. Antique lockets hold “forgotten sweethearts,” miniature archives of unknown lives. Some were found intact, while others were recontextualized by cutting locket-sized holes from the found images. Through photo archaeology, I reclaim discarded photos, dumpster-dived albums, and photos from my own family archive, once deeply personal, now anonymous time capsules. As our histories turn digital, this project honors the fragile physical traces that remain, in a world too distracted to remember, yet aching for connection. Given my history, I can’t fathom discarding family photos. Through this work, I give these faces new life and meaning, lost but no longer forgotten. Forgotten Sweethearts also gestures toward the broader forces that fracture genealogies—migration, war, diaspora, loss—and considers the quiet emotional labor of preserving memory.