family business
I became a photographer because my father was a photographer. When I was a child I used to spend time in his darkroom with him. He let me move the prints from the stop bath to the fixer; he taught me how to count to ten in French that way. When he died in 2001 I inherited all his equipment, cameras, lens caps, lens holders, lens dusters. His massive archives of work, and pictures of the family, parts of his darkroom and millions of cables that I will never know what they are used for. It was as if I had inherited the family business.
I had started to take pictures the year before he fell ill. That he died before I had the chance to show him that I too could be a photographer will always bother me. My fear that he would not think I am good enough will never go away. My fear that I am slowly forgetting the way he looked, how he talked and moved is terrifying. I am not sure which fear is worse.
The first two years after my fathers death it was almost too hard to photograph my mother. The act of turning my fathers old cameras, which were now so apparently mine, towards her was as if to make it all too clear again that the roles in our family were no longer the same. Or maybe it was not so much that the roles had changed, but I was now filling a space that I had not been in before. It was as if I was trying to keep my father alive by becoming him. But that is impossible. And I am not the same photographer as he is, even though at times we might have the same subject. It is as if I have this itching to constantly be reminded of him, constantly wanting to be close to him. And by living in his old equipment, t-shirts and photographs, I don’t have to accept that he is gone.
Eventually the space to photograph my mother became more available as our sadness became more subdued. Using my mother as a subject came so natural to me. And photographing her with my father’s cameras I hope is a comfort and joy for both of us. He is in a way bringing us closer to each other.
A couple of years ago I started to sort through all the boxes of pictures and negatives. I was instantly awe struck by the photos of my father and the beauty of my mother. I became obsessed. I collected and sorted and collected, put aside the beautiful ones; the sad ones and the ones that I did not think did them justice. Hung them up on my wall. I bought a huge corkboard, and rearranged the pictures. Paired them, triptych them, framed some. I eventually started adding pictures of myself, and pictures of my self with the pictures. It was as if I was trying to recreate a family life that was no longer. It was, as Geoffrey Batchen said, an “act of remembrance” .
My pictures in this body of work is either pictures that I have taken of my parents, some as early as 1988, or pictures that are reactions to photographs that I have found in the archive. Most pictures in the triptychs that are of my father are his self-portraits, and the pictures in the slideshow that are of my mother in seventies, are his as well. The other half of the slideshow is a selection of picture that I have taken of my mother since 2003.
Coming from a family with photography as our main core, using photographic language to address such topics as loss, grief, memory, authorship and family relations is the most natural way for me to say, Neil, see me now.
hannah goldstein, Stockholm, May, 2009.
