Papa

19 photographs of mostly plants brought together in a book called Papa (Dad). The book shows the title, Papa, on a plain white front. There is no context whatsoever, just the title and then the pictures; strangely overexposed pictures of mostly plants and trees. The pictures are printed on a matte paper type but the colors are bright and the pictures almost seem to come off of the paper. Every page or spread shows an overexposed portrait of a plant or tree and a single backside portrait of a man with long grey hair, my father. You get to see a hand pointing at a flower, that same hand holding a turtle, showing it to the camera. They are somewhat distant pictures, but there also is a certain tenderness to them.

I took the series of photos over a timespan of several weeks visiting my dad and talking to him. I wanted to get closer to him, to get to know him, but in the end we usually talk about plants, about the weather maybe, but hardly ever do we speak of what really matters: our shared past, his life, my life. I would almost call our relationship superficial, which it is not. This is the way we communicate, and the pictures I took symbolize this relationship. They show what we talk about, they show that I cannot get closer to my father in a very direct way, but we have a mutual understanding of things when speaking of mutual interest. By showing an excessive amount of what we do talk about, what really is missing, is what we don't talk about.