We can understand an album as a surface, a device or an artifact in which one or more people inscribe the memory of an experience, in which they try to record their passage or reflect one of the profiles of their identity. In this 90th issue of EXIT we open the first door to address the theme of the album from our own, intimate perspective, focusing on the work of photographers who have used this strategy to talk about something particularly close to themselves: their family, their environment, their friends or even themselves.

EXIT 90 Album I – Own Stories brings together the work of up to sixteen photographers who, from different perspectives, are representative of the topic. The central text, signed by the researcher María Rosón, talks about the album and the photographic compilation as a memory structure and a writing of the I/us, based on works by artists such as Jo Spence, Fernando Montiel Klint, Anna Fux or Ignacio Navas. In the dossier section, we present the work of twelve photographers. Trish Morrissey leads the way with a fictional exercise; Sian Davey and Doug DuBoys document their daily environment, linked to people in their family; Ana Casas Broda, Sara Davidmann, Diana Tamane and Suwon Lee dust off family archives to revisit the album concept; Sara Angelucci and Joy Gregory do a similar exercise but using objects such as a purse or clothes in a closet; Lebohang Kganye, Chino Otsuka and Jon Uriarte intervene, manipulate, directly in the archives, either from phantasmagoria or from erasure.