I found my father

16th January 2015

 

So this weeks post is a neg I found from about 8 years ago. Hoovering your archive can be cleansing and insightful. This image is from our family trip to South Africa. We were visiting my Auntie Iris in a home in Cape town and the whole trip was an emotional one.

I was asked recently if I ever photograph my family. It was raised as I often preach that I shoot subjects that challenge me and in honesty shooting those I know is the hardest. This question has definitely persuaded me to try and take some more images of my family and confront the barriers I feel with the visual familiarity. Perhaps the main reason I don’t is because I avoid shooting things that are personal or produce images that don’t speak to others or inspire a universally human subject matter. However perhaps for the benefit of my practice it would be interesting to see how my perceptions affect the relationship I have with my subjects and if there is a different aesthetic outcome. It would be nice to think of an experimental way of doing this to push the process further.

OAO x