It began with the gift of a painting: a depiction of Rangitoto with a mysterious ruin in the foreground. Investigating its painter led Stella Brennan to an 1897 picture of her great-great-aunt Louise Laurent with her female classmates, students at the same art school Brennan attended a century later. Struck by that uncanny affinity with a previously unknown ancestor, she embarked on a journey of research and revelation: cold-calling long-lost relatives, she unearthed an archive of Edwardian glass plate negatives that a cousin had carefully preserved since Louise's death in the nineteen-sixties. Despite being cracked and marred by mould and dirt, she meticulously scanned all three hundred fragile plates.

The result is not just a photobook but a poignant bridge across generations, a tapestry woven from the traces of the past into the light of the present.