The series of images, Fatherhood (2022- ongoing), evolved from a previous project, Nightshade (2020–22), which explored my parents’ troubled relationship. Cropped, scanned and enlarged analogue prints speak to the strange power of snapshot images: the freezing of fleeting, emotionally loaded gestures. Gestures of affection that mask the conflicted feelings often carried by children of abusive fathers. Blurred forms and grainy texture become clearer with distance—a trick of the photographic image, whose truths may only emerge through the lens of time and re-examination.
During my childhood, I struggled to reconcile the simultaneous love and hatred I felt for my father as I witnessed his alcohol fuelled violence. Picture my childish attempts to save my beloved mother from his irrational obsessions and rages, and simultaneously, clinging to the illusions of happiness that were posed and captured in our family photographs.
For some time, these soft-focus, images of traditionally masculine hands holding my siblings and myself in their strong embrace have remained in my studio: too painful to confront. The fatherly tenderness captured in them seems to belong to another reality—one recorded in family albums, but not in memory. The truth is that my mother took most of those mythical photographs, effectively erasing herself and her constant love from the archival record.
The failure of some men to love their children, through neglect or manipulation or by exposing them to violence and coercive control, is a little-understood aspect of domestic abuse. Photography’s ability to convince us that abusive men are loving fathers may be one of its most profound shortcomings.