Andrew Cowen Photo Diary is a family portrait of sorts, a love story photographed over time. Cowen photographs with an art director’s eye for detail and feeling for the page: dress-ups, lost teeth, hair-cuts, nitpicking, new school uniforms, family chooks, Lego, hand-drawn birthday cards, or perhaps just the feeling of a day, caught in the colour of the sea or sky. It is less a history of a family than a record of their imaginative life, of the explosive creativity of childhood and the tender self-fashioning of adolescence. These are stills from the theatre of family mayhem, frames measured by the diary’s day-to-day pace—a habit of record so disciplined it is almost, despite the sometimes camp content (“Flame on Mother Fuckers”), monastic. It is this deliberacy, sober as unconditional love, that makes this a collection of permanence, a family album for the ages.