I am now also posting on Substack! – https://mposborne.substack.com Do sign up to receive new posts straight to your inbox.
Photography and Fatherhood – Thinking about how photography links the generations.
In June 2022 I became a father. This was understandably a huge event in my (and my wife’s) life. What with the sleepless nights, nappies, and generally being on 24hr duty for our baby boy, thoughts of photography were put aside for a few months while I became accustomed to my new role in life.
When I eventually got back to taking photos, it was without the baby. The logistics in the early days just didn’t work. As he passed the sixth-month mark and we settled into our new house, I started to take the baby out in his pushchair on walks that were essentially for me to take photos. It was great. I could spend some one-on-one time with my son – even if he has no idea what I’m doing. He loves being outside looking at things, and his mum can have a well-earned break for a couple of hours. I occasionally get a decent photo out of it too. I also take a few of the baby which is always nice. Having him around on photo-walks helps me think about the process more. I talk to him about light, angles, compositions, and he just sits there and looks at me like I’m strange. I’m looking forward to when he’s old enough to carry my camera bag.
My whole relationship with photography stemmed from my father. Not that he got me into photography. He was a ‘keen amateur’ in the late 70’s and early 80’s, photographing lots of things around Yarmouth where my Mum and Dad first lived when they moved to the Isle of Wight in the mid 70’s.
The relationship I had with my father was one that can only be summarised as ‘complicated’. Without going into too much personal detail, he wasn’t around too much in my teenage years.
My dad used a Mamiya 645j and a Contax 139 as his cameras. I found the Contax in a draw under the stairs sometime in 1997 and emailed him to asked if could use it. He told me there were a few books on 35mm photography somewhere, so I found those and set about learning about this photography lark photographing my friends mountain biking. My dad was a very technical person which I think is why photography suited him. He designed radar systems for Plessey/BAE and went around the world setting them up. He knew about the technicalities of photography, but what few conversations we had about photography, none of them were ever on other photographers or discussing photography in any great depth.
I then came at photography from this technical angle. Making sure that the aperture and shutter were just so, the flashes were positioned and set correctly to balance with the light. All on film. Things like composition were a secondary consideration, but I soon learnt what worked and what didn’t aesthetically, even if from a technical standpoint things were ‘correct’.
My father passed away in 2007. I never went on photography trips with him or had any discussions about his photography. All I have are his cameras, darkroom equipment, and a large box full of thousands of slides and prints showing carnivals, sailing, fireworks, social parties, local events and the odd wedding from the early 80’s. I hope to go through it properly one day. Looking back, it seems odd that I have become so invested and all-encompassed by photography, which to my father was only a hobby alongside cars, shortwave radio, and sailing.
I’m still not sure why he stopped photography, or even why he started. I’d probably have taken it up sooner if he’d shown me how to process pictures in the darkroom (I still find it a bit magical). His stopping does co-inside with the births of me and my sister in the early and mid-80’s. Maybe for him, children were what stopped his hobby. Or he just simply decided the photography was done with as his life moved on. Which makes my passion for it a touch ironic.
Forty years passed between my dad becoming a father and me becoming one. The social responsibility of what a father is expected to do in that time has changed dramatically (for the better). My father was a ‘hands off’ father, which I don’t think was all that strange in the 80’s, but his idea of being a father and mine, from what I remember growing up, are vastly different. I really want to involve my son with my photography – and anything else I do for that matter. If he ends up loving it, great, if not then I’ll still bore him talking about art and photography. He’ll have no choice. I realise I am more ‘into’ photography than my father ever was which could be why I can’t think why I would ever give it up, and I want to include my son as much as possible.
While not really being something that one can have as hobby, I also have an interest in psychology. Looking at my relationship with my father, it is very conceivable that I am using photography as a connection to him, in a way to try and understand him more. Maybe 16-year-old me thought that photography was something that I should do because my father had done it, to try and make him proud of me. It was also my complicated relationship with him that has made me always want to better myself. I was contemplating going to university to do photography just before his death, he said it wasn’t needed, but seemed somewhat interested. I have no idea what he’d make of my Master’s degree. (Probably still say it wasn’t needed), or that I’d like to take my theory work even further.
The essayist Susan Sontag famously wrote that ‘All photographs are memento mori’ (Sontag 1979). This has been quoted by many a photography student (me included) to discuss the power a photograph has by stopping time and preserving what was in front of the lens. At the same time reminding us, the viewer, that the moment has passed and can never happen again. Reading further, Sontag continues:
A photograph is both a pseudo‑presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie (ibid).
I personally feel this quote is more inciteful as to the power of a photograph to make the viewer feel intimately connected to it as a record of something, or someone that no longer exists, especially if there is a personal connection. As I discussed in my Master’s dissertation on pose in portrait photography, Sontag’s famous quote frames the photograph as a reminder of death. However, as the latter quote suggests, photographs are better served as a reminder of absence, that someone lived and seems to continue to do so though that photograph.
Taking this further, thinking of photographs as objects, not just records of a subject, a photograph can remind us not only of what’s in the picture, but also that someone took that photograph. An invisible author who decided that what they saw was worthy of recording, capturing a moment in time that could outlive them. As a father, through the monumental joy of having a child soon comes a sobering melancholy that your child will outlive you. It is this thought that makes me want to involve my son in what I do before he finds his own path in life.
I have very few photographs of my father, but through the photographs he took and the cameras he took them on, I am reminded of him. As academic Marianne Hirsch comments, ‘photographs provide perhaps even more than usual some illusion of continuity over time and space’ (Hirsch 1997). While we didn’t have the closest of relationships, I feel strangely comforted that it’s through photography, even if separated by many years, that we can finally share an interest.
HIRSCH, M., 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Harvard:
Harvard University Press
SONTAG, S., 1979. On Photography. London: Penguin