So I just want to say I’m so grateful to be here at Frank. This is my first Frank and it won’t be my last. So what we’re going to talk about today is revaluing the family album, creating a new purpose for the family album in the digital age. And this journey that I’m on, that I’ve been on for many years, came out of making these personal films that always somehow end me back at my family album to find stories there and images there. And so I’ll take you through my family album. This first image was an image that was taken in the late 70s. It’s featuring me, my mom, my step- South African step-dad, Benjamin Puley-Linane, and his comrade, Copes. Lee and Copes were part of the first generation to leave South Africa, first generation of freedom fighters to leave South Africa and transform what was a local movement into an international movement. And that was the anti-apartheid movement. And so Lee became my step-dad. We had a difficult relationship. I was a rambunctious American child. He was a traditional African father. And whenever we would have these moments of silence, I would go to the basement and I would look through his photo images. Out of all the people he loved South Africa with, and they were one of the cells that left, there were 12 of them, most went to Cuba and got military training. My dad decided to come to this country and use journalism as his weapon of choice. And so he had a family album and also an archive. And I would go down and rummage through it. So even though I wasn’t talking to him upstairs, I was looking through his stuff downstairs. And I fell in love with these images. And so when I decided he died in 2000, I went to South Africa for the first time. And I went with a camera and I started filming. And I realized that the people in South Africa, the young people particularly did not know the story of this generation that left because of apartheid that history had been whitewashed. So no one knew what these guys were doing. There was this myth that they actually got an education, came back to run the country. They didn’t realize the tremendous suffering that the exile experience was about. And so I decided to take his family album back to South Africa and to encourage young people, engage young people to use this album to fill in the missing parts of the history. And it wasn’t just learning it. It’s the film I made, 12 Disciples of Nelson Mandela. They asked them to embody it. So I got these young South African actors, about 100 different actors in Blumfontein, South Africa, and had them both look at the images, tell the stories, but also connect them to the generation, the lead generation. And ironically, some of them were neighbors of these guys who had come back, these men and women. And but they didn’t know who they were. They didn’t know what they did. And so I, as a kind of lead queer son, was able to like transfer the stories from before to the stories to the generation after me. And so out of that, these young people started writing plays about the 12 Disciples. They started doing art projects about the 12 Disciples. And lo and behold, the film, 12 Disciples of Nelson Mandela and all this activity spurred a major impact in the country. So now everyone knows about this generation that left and what they did and their role in igniting a kind of global movement. And for me, it was so awe-inspiring because, you know, I grew up with him. No one knew about Nelson Mandela for the first eight years of our lives together. And then 1980, all of a sudden everyone knows about Nelson Mandela. So as I took the film around the country, people would say to me, can you create something that really helps us repurpose our family album? Because I have all this stuff and my kids don’t see value to it. So I created a project called Digital Diaspora Family Reunion. And Digital Diaspora Family Reunion involved having people come and share their family photographs with us. What we would do is we’d have one-in-one meetings with folks and guide them through stories in their family albums as a way to begin to scan them as a way to understand also the social historical aspects of the family album. So we traveled with this project to 70 different sites over the course of the last 10 years interviewing thousands of people about their family albums. And so people would share both one-in-one with the production team, but they would also share with the larger community and tell their stories. And what we would do is we would give them a mechanism to really understand the stories behind their family albums. So someone came up to me today and she said, I inherited a photograph of my brother, this big image, you know, he looks different than he looks now. Should I keep it? And I’m like, yes, it means something. We have to find a way of preserving these. And what is the story behind that? And why is that story important? So after interviewing all these different people, bringing people to stage. And when we had people come up to the stage this year, their family album and the story behind their family album, it was so powerful, particularly for people whose histories or stories have been erased or hidden. We decided to create a television series out of this after traveling around because we wanted to somehow create a major impact for it. One of the things that we realized as we were traveling around with the family album is that people, like one person said to us, I wish you had come a month ago. I inherited two boxes of images from my great-great grandmother. I’m sorry, my great-great-grand aunt. And I didn’t know what to do with them. I live in a small apartment in New York City. You know, I’m a young father, so I threw them out. I didn’t know they had any value. And I’m like, you threw them out. But he was like, I’m going to go and see if there’s still the duxter. So we realized we needed to make this project larger. We needed to actually create a space for people to share their stories and to see the social historical value of it. So we created a project called Family Pictures USA. It’s a television series. And what we wanted to do with Family Pictures USA was create, in the words of Howard Zen, a people’s history, to bring people together and think about creating, like letting the art in art, my photograph, impact you and letting the art in your photograph impact me so that we could see, share, and celebrate our collective humanity. And so Family Pictures USA, I’ll just share it right now. When you look at these images, what do these photographs mean to you? This photo means the world to me. This is my great grandfather right there. These are my cousins and my love. This is Family Pictures USA. Family Pictures USA Action. I’m Thomas Alan Harris, host of Family Pictures USA. I take pictures, make films, and now I’m traveling the country looking for stories hidden in the family album. It came from nothing and provided for us through Picking Orangeous. That meant the world. My dad worked at this plant for 20 years. Do you have a picture of your dad? This is his ID badge. Was it a crisis when you made the shift from tobacco? It’s not like a paycheck every month. Yeah. And the bills certainly come every month. Family Photos. We’re expanding our history. My mom brought us here from Vietnam. From Italy. Mexico. From India. From Guatemala. From Iran. Exploring the stories that connect us to people. It’s maintaining your life and your culture. And places. What happened to this neighborhood? There were a lot of these beautiful buildings that were mowed over. Family Pictures allows us to come together. And we’re one family. And we’re one family. Join us on this journey and you’ll never see America the same way again. Family Pictures USA, coming to PBS. So the series actually arrived already. It actually showed Broadcast in August of last year. And it’s still streaming on Amazon Prime. And we’re about to put it up on YouTube as well. And people on social media are uploading their photographs and telling their stories. And really telling origin stories. Like what created this place? Where did this family come from? And why is that important? So as we go forward, people also ask us to come to their hometowns for season two. So we’re planning the second season of Family Pictures USA. And in the meantime, we’re also continuing the movement internationally. We took Family Pictures to Ethiopia to train journalists and filmmakers to tell indigenous African stories rather than consume Hollywood stories. We took Family Pictures to Brazil, to the University of Brasilia to bring together scholars, students, community members at this historic moment when Afro-Brazilian representation at the university is on parity with their representation in the country. And here we are with Family Pictures moving forward. This is an art television, transmedia project that empowers audiences to tell stories and connects people personally with site-specific, history-specific art projects. So we invite everyone to come on tomorrow, a new love section, and experience it for themselves. Thank you so much. So amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.