Portrait of a Yearbook.

In the 1970s New Yorker Laurie Munn serendipitously discovered a 1965 yearbook titled The Altruist lying on top of a trash heap in Chelsea.  She saved the book for thirty years, recently uncovering it amongst her belongings while back in school for her MFA and needing a new idea for a project.  She flipped through the yearbook deciding to paint the portrait of each graduating senior.  

For background research, she went to check out the high school itself with a camera in tow, and while waiting in the principle's office, started talking to a man who just happened to have been in the 1965 graduating class of that high school.  He leafed through the book, finding out that the yearbook Laurie found was that of his classmate who he heard committed suicide shortly after high school, and that he had in fact written a message to him in his yearbook.  She eventually connected with a few other former Altruist seniors who gave her a little more insight into the portraits she was painting.

  

For thirty years she held this book in her posession-- probably buried in some closet or on a dusty bookshelf, never knowing how many stories were secreted between the pages.  Tragedies, humourous stories, embarrassments, the mundane.  How many forgotten objects, saved for some random reason, have stories tucked inside?