The family photograph album

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

The album was heavier than I remembered. Its pages resisted turning, separated by thin sheets of tissue that whispered against the photographs. Here was my father with hair falling over his eyes; here was an aunt standing beside a car nobody in the family could still name. The pictures presented the past with tidy borders, although the handwritten dates often ended in question marks.

I had expected the album to settle arguments. Instead, it supplied new ones. Was that the summer of the flood or the year before? Who had taken the photograph if everybody appeared to be in it? My mother pointed to a picnic and remembered wasps. My uncle remembered the long drive. I saw only smiling people beneath a tree. The image was not false, but it was economical with the day.

We left one photograph unidentified and moved on. At the back, an empty page waited under its tissue sheet. I had thought of the album as a locked cupboard of facts. It behaved more like a table around which people kept arriving with different stories. We closed it without solving everything, but the room was livelier than when we had opened it.

Refer to the whole of Source A. Analyse how the writer uses language to convey the relationship between photographs and memory. Explain the effects of specific words, phrases and language choices, using evidence from the passage.