Reimagining the classic family album
Meet Joy. The first interactive photo album.
It’s one of the classic philosophical questions: “What would you grab if your house was on fire?” As a New York Times writer once said, “The question isn’t, What would you grab in a fire? It’s, What has meaning in our lives?” The most common answer I’ve come across is our family photo albums — the priceless stories and legacy of ourselves and our loved ones. Photo albums are one of the few possessions that really cannot be replaced.
In 2014, my wife’s childhood home burned down in a flash fire. I remember when my wife called me. In pure shock, she said, “my house burned down. There’s nothing left. Everything, everything is gone.” Thankfully, everyone was safe but they did lose every possession they had ever owned. This included all their precious family photo albums — every single family vacation, baby album, her parent’s wedding album, and all the years in between. My wife’s photos from the day she was born to the day she went off to college were gone in a matter of minutes.
The following year, my wife and I had our first child, a baby girl named Liv. Like most new parents, we began photographing and recording every smile, cry and crawl. Before becoming a father, sharing photos felt overly public at times — it was more like an act of vanity. Of the hundreds of photos I was taking, I shared some of them, and never really looked back on any of them.
That all changed after we had Liv. It became important to share this special time with a small, private group of loved ones around the world. My parents and sister are in Canada, my wife’s family is in Texas and we have close friends in New York and across the country. When it came to photo sharing, I realized everyone was using something different: email, text messages, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, iPhones, Android, hard drives, Dropbox, Flickr, etc. My family photos were quickly being scattered all over the cloud and multiple devices. I began to wonder why my family and my generation stopped making photo albums like the ones we all grew up with in our childhood homes.
A few years ago, Time published an article titled “The Vanishing Art of the Family Photo Album” which described how photo albums were on the brink of extinction. The piece featured a Dutch curator named Erik Kessels who created an art exhibit called Album Beauty. Erik spent nearly 15 years rummaging through flea markets and secondhand stores for anonymous family photo albums. He explains:
“Family or personal photographs are now taken to be shared with everybody whereas in the era of photo albums they used to be much more private. We used to be the designers of our photo memories, not just someone who makes a slideshow on a computer. We don’t even have photos in albums any more.”
Earlier this year, I set out with my team to reimagine the classic family photo album. Our goal was to take the elegance of the photo album and completely modernize it with the best of today’s technology — a vivid touchscreen display, automatic gorgeous layouts, seamless software, secure cloud storage, video capabilities and wireless charging for unparalleled accessibility.
Our hope at Joy is for photo albums to once again be cherished possessions in our homes. Shaped like an open book, the Joy Album can live on your coffee table and also sits comfortably in your lap. It’s developed by a team that worked at Apple, Sonos, and Yahoo and helped create the iMac, Apple TV, and Sonos speakers. With Joy, your most cherished moments are now instantly viewable in gorgeous layouts — finally modernizing the lost art of creating a photo album.
Joy is available for preorder starting today for a special launch price at Joy.co
Feel free to message me with any questions. I’d love to hear your thoughts as we embark on our journey.
