All people meet by coincidence, even the family that meets at the table for breakfast the next morning. When two people of different nationalities get married, whichever country they decide to settle down in means that at least one spouse had to migrate. When I migrated from Malaysia to Italy, I brought boxes of letters and photographs with me. They are my most precious possessions. My children love to look at pictures of me as a child. And I love to take pictures of them.

The pairs of photographs in this series are intertextual by coincidence, the outcome of mixing two family photo collections. What this tells us about photography is not only that it captures the past, but that it allows us to see when family histories appear to be repeating themselves, and not just in family resemblances. Is it the technical needs of photography that impose demands on subjects to ‘pose for the shot’, making pictures resemble each other? Or rather is it the subjects themselves who are revealing to us that there is something universal and objective, that cuts across generations and cultures, about childhood and motherhood in the age of mechanical reproduction?