DEVELOPING US
Photography, Family, Feeling
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 how we might have gone on to be. It is through them that I travel to Tokyo, to the early seventies, to a time when my father loved the world so much, he wanted to capture it in a small black box.
Everything I learned about my father was eclipsed by his suicide. Using his photographic archive taken in Japan between 1972-1974, I explore his life, I find what I could not recall: everyday family moments..
My mother did explain what happened to my father at the time, but I was too young to understand. Later, if he was mentioned, I would be unable to speak and would have to leave the room. As a teen, I found out from school friends that my father had took his own 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, art and culture: invigorated by Japan.
In his photographs, I find a man very different from the one I had pieced together from stories. His camera showed what captivated him, not what he could not bear… And then by chance, I stumble across something. Something that I did not notice when his Super 8 films were projected on the wall; something I found in the stillness of a single frame.