Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
127 x 101.6 cm / 50 x 40 in
127 x 101.6 cm / 50 x 40 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
The studium of the photograph is easily read: a young man in a brown corduroy jacket, yellow shirt beneath, stands in a car park at golden hour holding a small child against his chest. The child’s arms are looped fully around his neck, face hidden, and behind them a cream-coloured tro-tro bus fills the left of the frame, another boy climbing its rear ladder toward the windows. It is a warm scene of arrival or reunion, competently affectionate, the kind of image whose meaning one grasps and files away almost before feeling it.
But then there is the sock. On the child’s foot, hanging at the man’s hip, a single thick cream sock has slipped half off, its ribbed cuff loose, a faint reddish smudge near the toe. That detail pierces. It is the sock of a child carried until sleep, of a body gone heavy and trusting, and it undoes the composed pleasantness of the man’s broad smile. I did not choose to be moved by it; it reached out from the picture and pricked me. Around it the rest reorganises, the grip of the fingers under the child’s thighs, the way the small weight pulls the jacket open.
This is the wound the series proposes, for it is an elegy made by a son for a lost father, and here the roles are quietly reversed and rehearsed: the young man plays the father he mourns, holding a child as he was once held. The photograph is thus a kind of time machine, an image of a gesture inherited and passed forward. The smile is for the camera and for the day; the sock is for us, and for the dead. It insists, against all the picture’s brightness, that tenderness is a thing that leaves marks.