The books are built around family photographs: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, all shown in their childhood. I transformed these images into colouring books so that the children could do more than simply look at them. They could touch the pages, turn them slowly, and add colour of their own.

Each book begins with a simple page that says This is me. From there, the story unfolds through the people who surround the child today — seen at a time when they themselves were small. I wanted the children to recognise familiar faces and, at the same time, to sense time moving quietly beneath the images.

I made these books by hand, thinking carefully about rhythm and sequence. About how a child opens a book. Where the story begins. Where it pauses. This was not just about assembling photographs, but about creating a gentle conversation between generations — one that does not require explanation, only attention.

When my grandchildren opened the books for the first time, they spent a long time looking. They asked questions, compared faces, laughed, and pointed. Then they began to colour. Through this simple gesture, family history shifted from something distant and abstract to something personal. By colouring the images, they were not only responding to the past — they were entering it.

At the end of one book I placed a photograph of a grandfather who is no longer with us. Before that image, I added a sheet of tracing paper. For me, this was an important pause. The past seen through another past. A moment of distance that asks for care, not avoidance.

My own family history was deeply affected by historical trauma. My great-grandparents were killed during the revolution in 1917 in Russia, and my grandfather and his siblings were saved by a woman who helped them escape — at the cost of changing their surname. With that, many connections were broken, and much of our family story was lost. Over the years, I have tried to recover fragments of this past through memories and stories, knowing that not everything can be restored.

These books are not an attempt to reconstruct what has been lost. They are an attempt to carry something forward. To build a bridge between past and future — not through facts alone, but through touch, curiosity, and shared moments.

My grandchildren will keep these books for many years and one day, they may open them with their own children or simply remember that behind them there is a history —one that can be held in the hands, page by page.