The Photo Album Isn’t Dead

(It Just Needed a Vibe Check)

There was a time when photo albums lived on coffee tables and inside drawers—sun-faded leather books filled with photos and handwritten notes. Every photo album i've known had some type of water (coffee, soda, juice) damage or pages that stuck together because they were passed around during a barbecue haha. They lived on my Grandma Shirley's coffee table and in my Mama Bessie's spare room. They were filled with baby pics, school portraits, some were people I knew, and others were people I didn't

recognize—life, frozen and filed away until somebody said, "Remember when?"

At some point, we drifted. Our memories moved online. We stopped printing and started posting. Memories got uploaded to Facebook galleries and tucked away on hard drives. Now, our most meaningful moments are trapped behind glass screens or sitting in a digital database somewhere between the cloud and your phone's camera roll.

In June, I decided to bring it back. I printed a photo book. Not for a special event or milestone—just for the vibes. A recap of the month. Random moments. Dinner with friends, a Coco Jones concert, a protest, and my son’s third birthday. The kind of stuff that doesn’t always make the feed but still means something. My followers might never see these photos, and that's cool—but my family will. And that truth means more to me than any like, comment, or repost ever could.

There’s something about holding a photo in your hand that makes it feel more real. Like it belongs to the moment it came from. Not just a screenshot of the past, but a piece of it. The texture, the weight, the feeling of permanence—it hits different.

And think about this: one day your kids might ask about you when you were younger—or about themselves when they were little. Could you imagine handing them a phone and saying “here, scroll through my camera roll”? Or dusting off an old laptop just to fire it up and go digging through folders for memory’s sake? Sounds like a low vibe activity… and I’m the valedictorian at BVU—Big Vibes University. Lol.

We stuff these devices full of photos—never to delete them, but rarely to revisit them. Rarely to relive or reintroduce the moments that shaped us. So I’m here to say: print 'em. Print 'em individually, print 'em in a book. Print 'em yourself or send them off to a company. Doesn’t matter. Just get back into the feeling. Because the feelings—and the moments—are fleeting enough already.

So now, it’s a new tradition: a photo book every month. Not to massage the algorithm. Not for y’all’s scrolling pleasure. Not for clout (I don’t need it)—just something myself, and more importantly, my kids can hold. Something that lives in real life. A personal archive. A time capsule I don’t have to plug in.

The photo album isn’t dead.It just needed a vibe check.