One night in a French château, a single line from a book brought a story to life. From that moment, Albertine was born.
Through mixed media photography and analog collage, Albertine reveals an extraordinary search for lost love. Each step takes us on a journey through distinct eras of Paris: the Belle Epoque and the intoxicating modernism of the early 20th century alongside the brutality of war and occupation. Discover these stories of longing not only for a woman, but for a vanishing city, inspired by old street photography and postcards of each era.
Notes on sources and care; see Provenance and Ethics for details.
Join the journey:
About me: Robin Rivers is an award-winning writer and visual artist whose work explores the nature of how we remember. Rather than treating memory as something fixed and unchanging, she works with it as an active process of reimagining. Her collages are constructed from archival materials—postcards, architectural drawings, letters, poetry—combined with her own interventions and layerings.
Robin's work focuses on cultural memory keeping and technologies of circulation—how stories and images travel between people and across generations. Her practice folds writing and original photography into a mixed-media collage process to examine how documented archives and personal interpretation shape our shared understanding of the past, while exploring how preservation itself is shaped by power, privilege, and historical upheaval.
“I completely fell in love… Robin explores the dreamy doorways to love and longing and makes us all wish we lived in Albertine's world.” – S.F.
This series transforms single antique postcards from anonymous Parisian street photographers into complex narratives that expand beyond Henri's personal quest. Each piece layers the romance of the Albertine story with the broader social realities of Belle Époque Paris, incorporating archival materials and historical figures to explore how individual longing intersects with the cultural currents of the era.
Les Paradis Perdus - 2025
Palimpseste - 2025
Rencontre (Encounter) - 2025
This narrative series follows Henri, a street photographer searching Belle Époque Paris for Albertine, whom he first saw in a postcard at a bouquiniste stall and has since vanished. Through mixed media collage, each piece captures Henri's longing as he glimpses her while photographing the city, layering Robin's photography, vintage ephemera, archival pieces, and handmade papers with actual street photography from the time to create fragments of memory.
A Promise Between Only Us - 2025
Fleur - 2025
Souvenir - 2025
Devotional - 2025
Pour L'amour - 2025
Achingly Still - 2025
These atmospheric studies of wintery, misremembered landscapes became the fertile ground where Albertine first took shape. Before the Belle Époque collages, before the love story emerged, these dreamy fragments captured the liminal spaces where memory and imagination converge.
Confluence - 2025
Watershed - 2025
Threshold - 2025
Thornwood - 2025
Remains - 2025
Albertine is, first and always, a love story—two people reaching for each other across time. The collages are built from antique postcards, street photographs, and ephemera that once moved through real hands in Belle Époque Paris. I source these materials from public‑domain collections and reputable archives, or use them with permission when required, and I note what’s known about each piece (date, place, publisher/collection). While the work embraces the dreamy, romantic edges of memory, I also place Henri and Albertine within the wider city they walked: its marketplaces and museums, its strikes and salons, its glitter and its shadows.
Because many original images are anonymous, I don’t claim to tell those people’s biographies; I let their presence set the scene and allow the fiction to unfold with care. When details are uncertain, I say so. My aim is to honor the past—its beauty and its blemishes—while inviting you into a story that feels intimate, tender, and true to the spirit of the time.