Over the past year and a half I have been exploring in my work what it means to be me and how that puzzle of myself fits into my family. My identity and my self expression are what help shape my ideas about my work. I Am My Father continues in that vein, as I express my gender identity through photos while also examining my relationship to my father. In each photo I tried to re-capture my father within myself by recreating old photos of him. Each piece contains the half that feels like my father, and the other half that feels like an honest expression of myself.
Half of this work is that I am my father in a myriad of ways- in our looks, our outfit choices, and our values. But what comes with exploration of my father is a realization that we are nearly complete opposites. Both of us are quiet but not in the same ways. As I've grown more into myself in the past couple of years I've learned the difference between the quiet of myself and the quiet of my father. He is stoic, a fast learner, a lawyer, a father. I am an open book, a visual thinker, a photographer, and his kid. We fit like a strange puzzle piece, not quite the right shape or size but some how we still fit together.
The second half is the ways in which I examine myself and how I perceive myself. I look to these photos of my father in the hopes that someday I'll look just a bit more masculine, a bit more confusing to a total stranger on what my gender is. In many ways I see these archived photos as a way out of my dysphoria and dissociation within myself. As much of a joke as these photos are, they're also an honest representation of how I view my inner self and the idea of who I am, and who I want to be.
Your encounter with these images may be colored by your own relationship to your father/father figure. There is a palpable dissonance that sits in the comparison- not just in looks but in feeling. A viewer may interpret my acts of re-creation as an extension of my father, or one may see it as the exact opposite. They could be seen as the ending of my father and the beginning of myself- my identity outside of him. That is the purpose of this dissonance, and the work itself.
Half of this work is that I am my father in a myriad of ways- in our looks, our outfit choices, and our values. But what comes with exploration of my father is a realization that we are nearly complete opposites. Both of us are quiet but not in the same ways. As I've grown more into myself in the past couple of years I've learned the difference between the quiet of myself and the quiet of my father. He is stoic, a fast learner, a lawyer, a father. I am an open book, a visual thinker, a photographer, and his kid. We fit like a strange puzzle piece, not quite the right shape or size but some how we still fit together.
The second half is the ways in which I examine myself and how I perceive myself. I look to these photos of my father in the hopes that someday I'll look just a bit more masculine, a bit more confusing to a total stranger on what my gender is. In many ways I see these archived photos as a way out of my dysphoria and dissociation within myself. As much of a joke as these photos are, they're also an honest representation of how I view my inner self and the idea of who I am, and who I want to be.
Your encounter with these images may be colored by your own relationship to your father/father figure. There is a palpable dissonance that sits in the comparison- not just in looks but in feeling. A viewer may interpret my acts of re-creation as an extension of my father, or one may see it as the exact opposite. They could be seen as the ending of my father and the beginning of myself- my identity outside of him. That is the purpose of this dissonance, and the work itself.
Below you can download the PDF version of the Book
| yosoymipadre.pdf |