How do we see history if it doesn't leave traces for us to look? Among some Chams (Muslims in Cambodia), and from among them, Saeths (descendants of the Prophet), the family photographic album is not only a collection of stills enabling family frames to come out. The pages situate lost images of long-gone relatives in telling absences; the spreading of stills on the floor ties uncertain genealogies with images of what certainly they could be; the picture-perfect moment of yesterday becomes selfie of a potential better yet-to-come. Cautioning us that history "cannot be told, cannot be written, cannot be seen," what some Cham and some Saeth thinkers might be suggesting is that history has to be engendered so to be, in ways that engender its very own methodology and theory. History has to be seen beyond its evidentiary regime in things that leave no archives, in sights that remain invisible, through a sustained attention carried through "practices of looking", as those very thinkers offer. Furthering those "practice of looking" in both alternative modalities of seeing history and pictures, this paper brings family portraits from the before the war(s) era (1950's-1960's) to wonder what engendering history could actually look like. Ultimately, taking inspiration in those anarchival endeavors offers pathways not only to write alternative histories of erasure under the specters of gender and silence but eventually to queer the temporalities that history takes to heart.
