Photograph by Paula Catão
Years ago, I saw a TV interview with the mother of a teen aid worker who’d been killed by bandits in Africa. She was promoting the publication of her son’s journals. An accomplished artist, he’d kept stunning scrapbook diaries, each page a dense mélange of writing, drawing, collaging, and ephemera collecting. Polaroids, plane and bus ticket stubs, wine labels, cigarette packs, matchbook covers, and articles and images torn from newspapers and magazines all found their way into his diary. I was enthralled. More recently, I did a Flickr search on “Moleskine,” the brand of journal that’s all the rage, and discovered dozens of similarly inspiring visual journals and scrapbooks. So I went out and bought a blank Moleskine journal, and have been bulking up its pages with pen, paint, and paper ever since.
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