Childhood

I love photographing my father who is now 88 yrs old. Like most dads of his era, he was the family photographer/chronicler (and a good one). A Canon around his neck on all the vacations, birthday parties, holidays, proms, and graduations, etc... To this day the Kodak slide containers sit like sentinels, labeled and at the ready, on the shelf in his bedroom. Isn’t it an irony that the man who was the recorder of family moments is now the subject of the my camera? what does it mean that the roles have switched? But unlike his job which was to record, on 35mm film, the family's momentous occasions, I don't find myself interested in the big events that define him. Instead, I find myself drawn to the unremarkable everydayness of him. If I’m being honest, part of the reason I take so many photos is because I fear his death. The day-to-dayness of being an old man is more profound than a young man's, is it not? For the old man, which day will be the last? And what do the photos reveal about this man that raised me? - a man I admire, a man that eludes me, a man I respect, a man I rebelled against, a man I have political battles with, a man I love… that he is just a man, like me.