CEAt what point in the project did you realise you were going to photograph until your Dad’s death? Did it happen organically or do you remember a point of no return… in the final days did you think of dropping it?

BCThe project was a very organic process, though that’s not to say it occurred with ease. I agonised for months over whether I should attempt to photograph our relationship at all. I eventually began tentatively with my wonderfully supportive tutor encouraging me to make pictures in whatever capacity I could manage. But without a plan or structure to guide me, I worried that I was just taking photos and not actually telling a story. When you find out you’re going to lose someone you love you don’t know what the story is, so you really can’t plan how to tell it. But slowly I began to see that what my photos revealed, as well as what they didn’t, evoked our journey quite honestly.

I didn’t expect I would photograph my Dad after he died. There wasn’t ‘a point of no return’, but rather a gradual building certainty of the value in what we were trying to do. So I never considered dropping it towards the end, quite the opposite – it kept me going. Each day that brought his imminent death into sharper focus, my project became more of a crutch, and more of a member of the family. When we had nothing to be positive about, the project gave us a way to be productive. If I took a photo of dad when he was too tired to speak, he’d still given me something – and he always wanted to give. When we said goodnight on his last lucid day he said ‘think about what we should shoot tomorrow for the project’, but the next day he was gone, just his shape remained, so I photographed his unconscious contribution.

I photographed the end before I saw it

CEWhen and why did you decide to include yourself in the frame?

BCInitially – before I actually felt I could photograph dad – I just took pictures of my own surroundings when I felt consumed by the grief. If I couldn’t sleep I took photos – and if the morning light hit my bed in a way that erased the gloom I took photos – and it made me happy. I was seeing a narration of my moods occur, but I felt these photos would only speak back to me, and not beyond.

So, that was the impetus for me to take another step forward… How do I really show what I’m feeling? Turn the camera around? So I photographed my face when I was sad. It seemed a ridiculously obvious idea. I wouldn’t have even called it an idea. It was the only thing I could think of to move myself on, but I felt very strange about doing it. I assumed the images looked clichéd and it felt dangerously close to narcissism. I didn’t show them to anyone for a while. But when I eventually did – within an edit of many others – the photos of me really struck people. And I knew that these images spoke about a relationship, which was very important to me, as I never wanted to depict a story of sickness and death. So I continued taking them. Progressing from just holding the camera at arms length to setting up shots on a tripod, felt very strange again, but enabled me to convey the context of our journey.

Me and Dad, 25th August 2009

CEThere are some amazing images in there but for me the strength of the project is so obviously its heartfeltness and the beautifully succinct yet complex captions which distill that feeling. Did you spend a long time putting the captions together? Did they come before or after the order of the final edit had been made?

BCI began editing about a month after dad died, but I was so intensely immersed in it then that it’s quite hard for me to recall the process. Realizing ‘The First Edit’ of The Dad Project, for my MA show which opened about 2 months later, was an incredibly cathartic way to grieve. I think the captions occurred simultaneously to the edit of photos. I was aiming to tell the story through the images, but sometimes I’d chose an image that illustrated the words I wanted to write. The more captions I managed to articulate the more value I could see in them. All the way through dad’s illness I wanted to write a diary – or at least some notes about the journey, but I never really did. It was only towards the very end, when I sensed we could really tell this story, that I began writing things down, or just consciously storing in my memory moments that felt pertinent. Most of the captions were from these memories.

Me.

CEHave you used words with pictures before? Do you think you will again?

BCI’ve really struggled with writing about my work in the past, and that’s always inhibited me from presenting it. The strength of The Dad Project captions has shown me so clearly how much can be added to a photo story with words, and has increased my confidence in my writing. But it wasn’t my writing skills that held me back before as much as a reluctance to articulate the stories of other people’s lives. I’ve never photographed a story of my own life before, and it seems to me it’s much easier to write your own story than someone elses. The responses to the film (I also made a short film from the footage we shot, which is based on interviews with dad) has taught me the same thing – as it’s his own voice providing the narration of the story. So this is my biggest lesson, but it I won’t be able to apply it directly to other projects. I fully intend to add words to all my work in future, but how I’ll translate the skills I developed through The Dad Project, remains to be seen. I’m simultaneously excited and apprehensive about it. Which brings me to your last question.

Collecting fallen hair

CEYou say The Dad Project will never end, but how do you follow on from it? What are you working on at the moment?

BCThe Dad Project is continuing in various ways that feel very right to me, most importantly, through other people’s responses to it. I receive so many wonderful emails from people describing their closest experience, or the perspective the project has given them on their own relationships. I’m also going to be involved in a large-scale project which will bring filmmakers and photographers together with cancer suffers to help them record and share their stories.

“You seem like a very kind man David.” “Well thank you Alan, I tried.” “Just keep on trying my friend.”

But, in terms of the next thing… I’m planning to return to an ongoing project photographing ambitious young people I’ve met in East African cities; how their rapidly modernizing urban lives often clash with their inherited family values; how exposure to western media sets their ambitions high but the opportunities available locally rarely support them; and how in the face of all this optimism seems to beat cynicism in most minds. I’ve been shooting this over the last 3 years, but incubating it for many more. The opportunity to bring this project into a critical educational context was actually the reason I applied to do the MA, but obviously, my path took a different turn and I didn’t get that chance. So I’m looking forward to returning to it with the new perspective The Dad Project has given me on telling stories; essentially that honesty is very engaging. I’ve always had an inkling but never quite the conviction to explore my own position within this work; that of being a white girl with a camera in Africa. The project means so much to me and yet the complexities of my relationship to it make me quite inhibited about describing it. So rather than let these things limit my story-telling I’ll attempt to include them in it – and hopefully get closer to understanding why I feel compelled to record stories of the optimistic Africa that I’ve known.