My father attempted to create memories and experiences that were usually in direct opposition to my own reality. He was a workaholic and an alcoholic with a cigarette permanently hanging off his lip. He had a dark sense of humor and could be difficult to live with often brooding and emotionally unstable. I was drawn to him as a moth to a flame, so to speak.
“I was 7 or 8 years old and remember dad yelling at my mom one summer night, he was drunk and chased her down the street. He hit her across the jaw. The police came later and took him away for the night. Then there was the morning where he parked the van in the garage. I was walking down the driveway to catch the bus to school. He pulled the garage door down with the engine still running. We visited him at the Reading hospital a day later and I remember feeling sad even as we joked and teased him about his blue foam slippers and the thin gown that didn’t quite cover him around back.”
The majority of the photographs were made during my senior year at university, 15 years ago, and the year following graduation when I took care of my father as he battled cancer. During this time I photographed the physical disintegration of his body and witnessed the psychological struggle that my father faced as his body withered and turned against him. Our existing parent child relationship flipped and I took control of the one thing in this relationship that I felt I could, the camera. These photographs document my father in his final months and provide an inside look into a man’s life, desperate and sick, grappling with his own reality and his imminent death.
Legacy is sometimes humorous, often sad, and perhaps a little dark. This work is about what my father left behind, the memories and experiences I had with him – his legacy.
