This flip-through book is a dummy that I made at the Photobook as Object workshop with Yumi Goto at the WOPHA foundation in Miami, Florida.
It tells the story of my mother before I knew her, and before she knew herself. My mother was a first generation immigrant from the Philippines, meeting my Ohio-born father in Manila and marrying him when she was twenty years old. In this book I explore her girlhood fantasy dreams, which largely consisted of meeting a man that would sweep her off her feet, and take her away from a third-world nation to a first-world one. She got what she wanted. But it wasn’t what she thought it would be.
My mother was a voracious reader of exactly two genres of writing: Biblical and trashy romance novels. I would be slack-jawed, encountering her on the couch in the early morning hours, as she devoured five, six, seven hundred pages of western historic smut. The book dummy object is the exact dimensions of an American paperback romance novel, and pages from one of the authors she was devoted to are used throughout.
One of my most prized personal possessions is a stack of black-and-white photos taken by a different American serviceman than the one my mom married. He was clearly smitten with her, and wrote insanely cheesy captions in red flare pen on the backs of the images. My favorite is, “Bare foot girl with cheeks of tan (ha ha).” Some of these occur like a leitmotif through the book.