My father was a photographer. He was a serious photographer with a great deal of talent and skill. The house I grew up in even had a darkroom. I remember playing with the lights and the huge sinks as a child. It was a place that we weren’t really supposed to be, I guess, but at the same time, I don’t remember ever seeing it being used so I probably didn’t think it mattered.
My father had cameras of all kinds. When he was younger, he entered his photos in contests and at least one traveled around the world in an exhibition. The odd thing is that I don’t remember him taking pictures. I remember him taking snapshots with simple cameras, the film to be developed at a regular photo shop, but never photographs. By the time that I became inquisitive about photography, that part of his life seemed to be already over.
What I do remember is the photographs themselves. They were all taken well before my memory, and most likely well before me. I remember the one that traveled in the exhibition. It’s a photo of my brother, looking slightly tired, posed leaning over a Mother Goose book. I remember a study he did of a giraffe that hung on the walls for a long time. It was done in harsh black and white, with the giraffe’s spots and neck in sharp contrast.
I don’t think it would be too far from the truth to say that my dad and I weren’t that close. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other; I just don’t think we ever really got to know each other. I was always a bit dismissive of what he did with his life and his skills. When I would feel lazy or feel like I could just make do with what I already had, I would think about my dad, because I always thought that that’s what he did, and I had trained myself to think that I needed to do ‘better’ than that. So, by thinking of my dad, I could scare myself enough to work harder. It’s really a very cruel thing to use as motivation, but it has been effective.
Last week though, I went to the darkroom to develop my first roll of black and white. Ilford 100. I tried not to think about it as a way of communing with my dad, but that’s the way my brain works, and the more I tried not to think of it, the more settled it became in my mind. After awhile, I gave in. I tried to imagine him in his darkroom. In my mind, this image of him was of long before I came along, and he was just a guy trying to put his image in his mind on paper. The scene was there. A lanky man bent over the sinks, then pinning prints to a line with clothespins. But I didn’t have a frame of reference for him in this mode, so he seemed undefined. As I got deeper into the process of developing the prints, my mind wandered elsewhere.
I was developing shots that I had taken downtown. A shot of a jazz musician. A shot of people walking purposefully down the sidewalk. Then two shots of children. As I looked through the magnifier to check the grain before I exposed the paper, I realized I could make out features of the little girl, even at the grain-level. The image was entirely gone, completely reduced to the piece of an eye that I could see. The image of my father changed. He was looking at a photo of his daughter. My sister.
I’d like to say that I felt a little closer to him at that time, but I’m not sure I did. I’m not even sure that that is something I want. I certainly don’t presume to say that I know him better today than I did before, and I’m not sure that that is what I want either. But I can say that while I was looking at the grain on the face of that little girl, I remembered the picture that, of all his pictures I’ve seen, is my favorite. It’s a picture of the whole family. My mom, my brother, my sister and me. And my dad. We’re all sitting on a fence in the back yard of the home where I grew up. It’s a snapshot.
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