I would stare and stare, puzzling over who I was, and what the relationship was between who I thought I was and who I really was and the face that was staring back at me. I knew I wasn’t my face. If something terrible happened to me, like a fireworks accident, if I lost my face and spent my life bound in bandages like a mummy in a scary film, I’d still be me, wouldn’t I? I never found an answer, not one that satisfied me. But I kept asking. I suppose I still am.

That was the first question. The second was even harder to answer. It was this: Who are we?

And to answer it, I would open the family photo album. The photographs, black and white at the front, color in later volumes, had been carefully stuck into the family album with photo-mounts on the corners, and handwritten notes beneath each photograph identified the subjects, and where and when the photograph had been taken. Glassine, semitransparent paper covered each page. There was something extremely formal about the photo albums. We were never permitted to play with them unsupervised, or to remove photographs. They were, when the time was right, produced by adults from high shelves or dark cupboards, only to be put away again once we had looked at them. They were not to be played with.

This is who we are, the albums said to us, and this is the story we are telling ourselves.

There were the dead, grave people in uncomfortable clothes, posed in black and white. There were the living, when they were so much younger as to be different people: the old people were young people then, in ill-fitting clothes and in places we could scarcely imagine. Here assembled, formal and stiff, are grandparents and great-grandparents, uncles and aunts, weddings and engagements, silver and sepia, gray and black, and then, as time moves forward, the people and the poses drift into color and informality, the snapshots and the holiday shots and look! you can recognize the wallpaper and you realize that the proud grandparents are holding a baby that was you, once upon a time. And now you are here again, in context, pondering your infancy, and the people who surrounded you, and the world from which you have come. Then you put down the photo album and go back to your life, reassured, given a frame and a place. The images of our forebears and our loved ones give us context, they tell us who we are.

For years, I believed I had visited the National Portrait Gallery, because I had been to the National Gallery. After all, there were portraits on the walls, were there not? It was not until I was a grown man that I finally wandered the corridors and spaces of the National Portrait Gallery and realized that I had never been there before. The embarrassment in my mistake was rapidly replaced by delight. I was glad I hadn’t visited the Gallery as a boy: I would not have known who these people were, save for a handful of kings, and perhaps Shakespeare and Dickens. Now, it was like being handed an album of a family I knew too well.