The Photo You Carried

Japan · Late 1990s A friendship could fit in the corner of a notebook. Print Club arrived in Japan in July 1995; the photo-sticker culture that followed made taking, keeping and exchanging tiny portraits part of the fun. Manufacturer FuRyu’s retrospective describes both sticker books and exchanges. This imagined album evokes keeping and exchanging pictures; it is not a reconstruction of a 1995 Print Club sticker sheet. The portraits show fictional friends. The memory is in the small decision: which picture did you keep, and which one did you give away? AI-created imagined scene; not an archival photograph or a record of real people. Sources: FuRyu — Thirty years of photo-sticker machines — https://www.furyu.jp/news/2025/07/puri30th/