About the exhibition

Notebooks, journals, and diaries give us glimpses into individual private lives and personal thoughts that are otherwise missing from the historical record. But does "private" and "personal" necessarily mean unfiltered? People use diaries to document their days, provide a creative outlet, record their travels from home, or comfort them in difficult times. The act of keeping a diary shows a desire to preserve stories for future reading, even if only by a future version of the self. Sometimes diaries are intended for publication from the beginning, and in other cases the decision to edit a diary for publication is made later on. We invite you to think about how journals embody elements of both private and public writing and the overlap between these categories.