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, Henri and Albertine reveal their extraordinary search for lost love. Layering photography, papers, and vintage found materials, these fragments capture that aching quality of remembered connection—the way certain light delivers the memory of a touch or a scent can resurrect an entire relationship. Each step takes you on a journey through Belle Epoque Paris doorways. There, you'll find stories of longing for someone who exists now only as memory inspired by old street photography and postcards of the era.
Now, what began as an intimate love story has expanded to explore the broader social currents that shaped their world.
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
If Only We Had More Time - 2025
Fleur - 2025
Souvenir - 2025
Devotional - 2025
Exposition Universelle - 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