C-print, 60 x 80 cm, 2007
This is an early experimental photographic work of mine, combining a child’s play on colouring images and an image of my father taken for school. My father died very young, when I was just a baby. As a child I used to imagine him via the few photos that I had of him.
In the famous Oscar Wilde novel ”The Picture of Dorian Gray”, a young man sells his soul to ensure that a painted picture of him will grow older in time rather than his own appearance. In the image of my father I saw the opposite: a picture of a person captured in his youth, never to get to grow old.
In ”Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes the author writes: ”There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved.” He then discovers a picture of his deceased mother as a child and continues: ”I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother”.
The impossibility of remembering one’s parents as children is surpassed by the sense of recognition. These are the grounds from which this image emerged.
