SAKURA

Of the items I inherited from my father - a lighter, a frayed tie, his music recordings, documents in scratchy, illegible writing - it is his photographs that I love the most. In them, I find my sense of him, of us, of how we were and might have gone on to be. Through them, I travel to Tokyo in the early seventies, to a time when my father loved the world so much he tried to capture it in a small black box.

Everything I learned about my father has been eclipsed by his death. Through his photographic archive—taken in Japan between 1972 and 1974—I revisit those years. In these photographs, I find what I do not recall: a glimpses of ordinary family life.

When I reached sixteen, the family moved away from my hometown. I left everything I loved. I fell apart. In the ashes, I found my mother. She became the author of my father in my mind's eye. Grateful for her honesty, I was heartbroken by stories from his troubled life.

In the years preceding my father’s death, we moved as a family to Japan. If his moorings were adrift, my father looked away from this. He turned towards music, architecture and culture. he was invigorated by Japan.

In his photographs, I find a man very different from the one I had pieced together from stories. His camera captured what captivated him, not what he could not bear.

My mother explained what happened then, but I was too young to understand.

My brother went away to boarding school, my mother began to rebuild her life, and I lost myself to friends. If he were mentioned, I'd be unable to speak and would slip out of the room. Years later, as a teenager, I heard a rumour at school that my father had taken his own life.

And then, by chance, I stumble across something.

I can only ever imagine.

I find my father.

And his thoughts…

Something that I overlooked when I projected his Super8 films onto a wall.

Something I found in the stillness of the single frame.