This series of images, evolves from a previous project, Nightshade (2020–22), which explored my parents’ troubled relationship. For a long time these soft-focus, images of my late father’s strong hands holding my siblings and myself in their embrace remained in a drawer in my studio - too painful to confront. The fatherly tenderness captured in them seems to belong to another reality, recorded in family albums, but not in memory. What has not been documented in the photograph albums is the violence and coersion that he exerted over my mother . Or the effect it had on us, his children. Is traumatising children the action of a loving parent?
Cropped, scanned and enlarged from analogue prints, the images speak to the strange power of the snapshot: the freezing of fleeting, emotionally loaded gestures. Gestures of affection that hold conflicted feelings for children whose father, like mine, abused their mother. The blurred forms and grainy texture of over sized prints become clearer with distance—a trick of the photographic image, whose truths may only emerge through the lens of time and re-examination.
Photography’s ability to convince us that abusive partners can be loving fathers may be one of its most profound shortcomings.