A boy who, at the age of 18, was captured in Italy and transported across Europe to Poland. A boy who, as a paratrooper was involved in acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. The story of a fifteen-year-old boy (a boy the age my own son is now) who lied about his age to join the army at the beginning of World War 2. Very slowly, from the fading memory of a man who had locked things up for so long, a story started to emerge. Only this time I wouldn’t be intimidated by the silence. Roaming around those bare rooms I could still feel the atmosphere of my childhood: trapped like dirt in the carpet. Only this time it was empty: my parents having just been re-housed because the estate was to be demolished. The fact that ‘Reas’ was not the family name but one which was adopted by my fathers’ mother (a woman I never met) from a man she knew when her and my father lived in the U.S.A.Īnd so, ten years since the original work, I went back to the house. But it wasn’t all photographs: much of my father’s life was to be revealed. ![]() His strange obsessive-compulsive behaviour, like his refusal to ever throw anything away: drawers full of un- opened Christmas presents and thousands of plastic bags, the mood swings, the loud recurring nightmares and the suspicion and distrust of everybody. They poked around in the shadow this man had cast upon my life but never considered the reasons my father might be the way he is. Indeed, these early photographs only ever looked at the behaviour never the cause. Only recently have I realised that the image of the moth also represents the entrapment of my father. At the time I saw the moth as being me: held in a suspended state waiting for the return. I photographed a moth trapped in a spiders’ web in the bathroom. With hindsight, what an effective metaphor that act had become for the process of trying to uncover my identity. A stone embedded in a piece of waste ground next to the house where I would spend hour upon hour digging in an effort to get to the bottom of it, trying to establish its shape and size. Photographs that attempted to define the shape of my childhood, such as the image of ‘the stone’. I tried to make photographs that spoke of the emotional and psychological impact of this man on my life. Who was this man? Where did he go?.”Īrmed with a camera (an effective weapon/barricade) and the courage of a 38-year-old son, I returned to my childhood home to face the foreboding presence of him. ![]() Only ever there on Sundays and even then, a sleeping, silent figure in an armchair. For as long as I can remember my father has been an ‘absent presence’ in my life. A lonely man? A man of greed and sarcasm. He is a man I recognise but know nothing about. At the time I wrote, “For thirty-eight years I have carried this man inside me. Twenty six years ago, I was commissioned by Val Williams to produce work about my troubled relationship with my father for the Barbican exhibition, ‘Who’s Looking at The Family’.
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