A Delicate Note: The Return Gaze

How did I feel around my father? I asked of family photographs. What can I tell from my return gaze? Am I at ease, performing for him, or slightly withdrawn? From the extensive choice, I select the most troubled picture of myself as a child. It was a studio portrait. My father hadn’t even taken the shot!

I digitised hundreds of family photographs that had been consigned to storage—unprocessed and undeveloped, much like the events surrounding my father’s suicide. Black and white negatives, colour slides, and Super 8 films, taken between the 1960s and early 1970s. Chasing his ghost, I search for his traces in glossy prints and digitised files. What could these images tell me about my father? What drew his eye? How did he see the family through his lens? Did his photographs correspond with life events?—the moves abroad, his relationships, his career changes, and his mental health struggles? 

What emotions surface on my face as I look back at him through the camera? And why am I drawn to the most troubling shot that my father didn’t even take of me?

What is striking is that this is the only photo I can find from this shoot. If this was the best one, I wonder what the rest were like--how uncomfortable or forced the experience might have been and what that says about the underlying tensions.

I discovered that my father's mother orchestrated this photograph of me in a studio with a photographer. This shifts my attention from my eyes towards the delicate musical-note details on the dress.

My father’s loving, musically ambitious parents pressured my father to practise music for hours as a child. Is the musical note a symbol, a moment of communication between my grandmother and my dad, with me as the unknowing messenger in between? Something is unsettling about that, as though the attempt to create a loving gesture captured something else entirely—perhaps an unintended reflection of the pressures my father once felt in his childhood.

This photograph holds the entire weight of the family constellation—my grandmother’s expectations, my father’s struggles, and how, without realising it, I became part of that story.

This image was not an “accountant’s truth”—a factual, objective document of my father photographing me—it was what filmmaker Werner Herzog describes as an “ecstatic truth” or “poetic truth.” It reveals how images can convey more profound truths about our experiences and emotions than mere facts.