Portrait

My father gave me my first camera. He encouraged me to show people the way I see things, even if he often had little understanding of the ways in which I saw. 

Born in Chicago in 1928, my father was of a generation—or maybe just of a certain disposition—who rarely went outside without a jacket and usually a tie as well, used shoetrees, and always carried a handkerchief. He could often be found in his chair in the living room reading a book. He had moved to New York in the mid-fifties, married my mother, and raised and supported three children. He preferred the subway to the bus, and when he was no longer able to walk with a cane, he refused to use a walker or a wheel chair. He died at home on a perfect day in May two years ago. 

The images in this exhibition are a collection of artifacts from his life—objects he used and touched repeatedly—and they relate to my own interest in the ideas of impressions, residues, scarring, and evidence, which are at the core of the photographic process. There is something forensic in my exploration of these objects, and while emotional, the process is not merely sentimental. 

When I found the piles of his checkbook ledgers in his bureau, I read through them looking for stories of who my father had been before I was born. The shoes, the jacket linings, the ties, all with their unique patterns of wear, offered up clues to the life lived within them. The mirror lay on his dresser every day as part of a set that included a hairbrush—probably a gift from someone in his family. I photographed the handkerchiefs just a few weeks before his death, and the first photograms were made a few months later.  Both are about traces of use and transference—I had been thinking a great deal about relics and shrouds at the time. When my father could no longer speak he asked for a pad. The last week or so his handwriting deteriorated but his desire to communicate was still there. At a certain point I knew he was at peace. 

I chose to shoot everything on black and on white—to decontextualize the objects, using a convention of commercial photography that attempts to make whatever is in the photograph both more specific and less so, and giving it iconic status. The black and white are also a reference to the very basic aspects of photography—light and shadow. In letting go of my father as he died, I came to see that no one is all light or all shadow, and it is the constant interplay of these forces that makes up a life.