ABSTRACT
Whilst analysing the data from a study of adoptive parents engaged in the practice of maintaining a 'life story' book for the children in their care, we were struck by the repeated references made by parents to objects that had accompanied children from their former care placements: photographs, shoes, hats, a Pooh bear, a battered Snoopy dog, plastic toys. Our analysis concentrated on the first of these objects (photographs), because these are particularly potent artefacts, around which the work of remembering former carers and biological parents is done, and are central to the creation and maintenance of life story books (see Brookfield et al. 2008). We described how these images presented dilemmas to adoptive parents. Some photographs depicted former carers, to whom, parents feared, adopted children might still be overly attached. Other photographs showed children in states all too easily readable as neglect, or worse. In both cases, adoptive parents were torn between the need to preserve for the child the past that was legible in the photographs and the corresponding need to manage and 'tame' that past within a narrative and practice of building a 'new home'. More difficult still were cases in which photographs simply did not exist, leading some parents to specially construct new images, sometimes at the behest of the child, to assist in filling out the gaps.
