I found this scrapbook at the Vancouver Flea Market. The cover is made of cardboard designed to look like snakeskin. It was unblemished, as if it had been sitting on a shelf for a long time. Inscribed on the spine: “1962–1965.”

Collecting is more than ownership. Collecting invokes the hunt or chase, the moment of acquisition, the quick perusal, the trophy hanging over the wet bar in the basement. How do you know you’re a collector? When the thing itself is secondary to the act of finding it. This is the (shameful) secret of collecting. When I began collecting photo albums, I would take each new find home with me, glance over it quickly and put it away on the shelf. One day a friend pulled what I thought was a favourite acquisition off the shelf and said to me, “So this dead man propped up in the chair must be the uncle.” Dead man propped up in a chair. How had I missed that? (Not to mention the fact that she had sussed out that he was the uncle.) I pretended to know what she was talking about and remained nonchalant. Inside I was reeling. I’m a photographer, after all. How had I overlooked a dead man propped up in a chair? It was time to look at my relationship with the act of collecting and, more precisely, with the question of photo albums.

I realized that my compulsion to collect photo albums had to do with the idea of rescue. My only consideration when purchasing or otherwise obtaining an album was that the album had somehow left the confines of its originating family and had magically made its way into the impersonal marketplace of the antique store, the thrift store, the dealer in paper ephemera, eBay, the back alley, the garbage dump, the basement of a house being demolished. These albums are like shivering kittens. I rescued them from the nastiness of not being wanted and the potential further nastiness of having a price attached to them. How do you throw away or commodify these mundane precious efforts? I pay for albums in order to remove them from the market, to ensure that they are no longer commodities. I own them. (I think I own them.) They will not be bartered, traded or sold in my lifetime. The supreme importance of these albums lies in the moment of their making and the ultimate indifference to their fate. As Stephanie Snyder notes in Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album, it is precisely because these albums flourished in the domestic sphere, removed as they are from the institutional protection of a museum or gallery, that they are vulnerable to neglect and disappearance. To attempt to forestall the processes of neglect and disappearance is the futile gesture, the essential gesture, of the collector.

I found this scrapbook at the Vancouver Flea Market. The cover is made of cardboard designed to look like snakeskin. It was unblemished, as if it had been sitting on a shelf for a long time. Inscribed on the spine: “1962—1965.” The inside appeared at first to have been vandalized. Pages had been ripped, cut, slashed at and torn out. Photographs, too: ripped, cut, slashed at and torn out. The vendor who sold it to me said that it came to him in that state, from an estate sale. The owner might have been American. On one page, “Canadian International Control Commission” is inscribed above four pictures of Caucasian men drinking and smoking cigarettes in the company of young Vietnamese women. In fact, many of the intact photographs depict men drinking and smoking in the company of young Vietnamese women.

Extent of damage to the scrapbook:

Pages completely torn out: 54

Pages torn, cut or slashed: 173

Pages intact (images removed): 40

Pages intact (images intact): 32

Images in scrapbook: 153

Fragments of images in scrapbook: 52

Images completely ripped out (estimated): 742

The pages and the images have been damaged in several ways, which is puzzling. Why, if you have started out simply tearing them, would you then feel the need to use scissors? That one would go from tearing out single images to ripping out whole pages suggests a need for haste. The destruction may have been carried out by the creator of the album, someone close to him, perhaps even the disperser of his estate. To suggest a benign interpretation, perhaps a daughter in grade 5 needed those images for her history project (although the violence done to the pages suggests otherwise). Given the number of women whose photos remain in the album, and the textual evidence of many others who are no longer there, perhaps it was a disgruntled wife, ex-wife or lover, cutting away at her husband’s, ex-husband’s or lover’s sexual history.

Censorship may also have played a role. The scrapbook’s subject is wartime Vietnam. It is possible that images torn from the book contained “sensitive” military information. They may have been removed as early as 1971, when the album owner seems to have left the country. Remaining fragments suggest that most of the missing images were of people—the scraps show parts of the faces of men who worked in his office, and parts of the faces and bodies of young Vietnamese women and children. Perhaps these images provided evidence of activities that we do not wish to imagine.

The images that are intact document the sporting life of Saigon, particularly the clubs on Tu Do Street, known for its cheap bars, deafening sound systems, Vietnamese bands performing Motown covers, teenage girls selling “33” (a beer also known as “tiger piss”), and a ready supply of drugs and sex. The owner of the scrapbook spent much of his free time in or near the bars on this street, with or without co-workers, with or without the company of paid hostesses, girlfriends or prostitutes. And when he wasn’t patronizing these hot spots, he was busy throwing parties and attending others.

The official and dominant stories of Vietnam are stories of carnage and fear. The record in this album hints at none of these things, in part because of the man’s urban office posting, and in part because no one wants to remember dreary or frightening things. That is the difference between a personal record—a personal photo album devoted to what joy can be wrested from this life—and the photographs and stories in the official record.