Photobook Review: The Mothers I Might Have Had by Caroline Furneaux

When her father died, Caroline Furneaux found a box of slides he had kept. They showed his girlfriends before he married Barbro, who would become Furneaux’s mother. These are the pictures of his former loves, of the mothers Furneaux might have had.

The first time I saw The Mothers I Might Have Had was in an exhibition at Format Festival in Derby. They showed in the kind of slide viewers people had back in the day, small single-image viewers that came in the form of tilted plastic boxes. You popped the slide into a slot at the top, the backlight would switch on as it clicked into place, and then you’d view it through a magnifying screen that was maybe 10cm across.

There were around six of these contraptions lined up in Furneaux’s exhibition space and there were queues for all of them. Others shared in the simple pleasure I took in seeing the film become almost 3D in its luminosity. I’d glory in the colours, in the better-than-life rendition of skin tones, of the blue of the sea, of the white of the clouds. It was a marvellous thing to behold, a reminder of why I love positive film so much. There is something honest about it, something truthful in it. You don’t need to enlarge it, print it, or transform it from a negative to a positive image. It’s there for you already in all its glory.

The dilemma with positive film is how do you translate that noumenal tangibility onto the page, how do you reference that viewing pleasure. You can photograph the viewing experience as seen through a magnifying lens (or through a projector). You can show the slide mount, and slide mounts from Kodachrome to Gepe have a snappy pleasure of their own. Or you can show the film rebate, which instantly captures the positive nature of the film through the rebate notches or text.

In The Mothers I Might Have Had, Furneaux takes a different path, combining entire images with tight crops of key details, places where the texture of the grain holds centre stage as we see brushes scrubbing cars, bikini bottoms, towels, sunglasses, a dog, and a pair of hands gently folded one over the other.

The images are marvellous, a roll-call of glamorous lifestyles complete with zippy little sports cars, beaches, bikinis, and great hair. It starts with Bibi, standing by a white convertible by Helsingborg Harbour. We know it’s Helsingborg Harbour because the images are accompanied by Furneaux’s notes.

Bibi is followed by Isabelle (by a blue car this time), Charlotte poses with a dog, and Judy sits wearing a white polka dot bikini on a swing in front of beach huts.

Colin leads an enviable lifestyle, one in which the sun always shines, the beach is always near, where style is non-negotiable, and money and work are not a concern. We see Britt staring straight at the camera wearing a coat with a fur collar. With her immaculate hair and beautiful skin she has something of Lady Penelope from the Thunderbirds about her.

Julie (resplendent in her blue raincoat and red headband) stands by a giant cactus, leaning her head against its spines as she smiles for the camera, while Liv is photographed on the end of a very modern phone for the time, one where the handle is also the stand.

The one woman who appears repeatedly is Pia. We see her gathering buttercups on a cliff by the sea, comically wearing a diving mask and snorkel, and finally at Colin’s home, a few weeks before he will ask Furneaux’s mother out for the first time.

These are pictures of an exclusive optimism, the images framed to monumentalise the passing of partners and time, a memory bank not just of the women who are featured here but also of a very aspirational lifestyle.

The question is how do you remember this. We learn from the accompanying text that for Furneaux, these images are not a portal into the mothers she might have had so much as the father she might have had.

One’s wanderings into her father’s idealised life of leisure are brought down to earth as Furneaux tells us of her talking with him on the phone shortly before he died, the strained communication of the past forgotten in what he seemed to know were his final moments.

The mothers Furneaux might have had become part of something distant as our attention turns to the concrete realities of Furneaux and her relationship with her father. We hear about her first camera and the boyfriend she brings home. He breaks a kite and Colin gets angry. It’s not an easy relationship.

And then we see him. His name is Colin and he appears in a pair of red trunks sitting on a rock looking out to sea. A picture of Furneaux’s mother comes next, standing next to Colin’s red Roadster in her blush bikini. The picture was taken before they married, outside Colin’s brother’s house.

‘The next day she proposed to him,’ reads the text. ‘I asked her how these photographs made her feel. “You should have seen the boyfriends I had,” she replied.’

But that's another story.

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The Mothers I Might Have Had by Caroline Furneaux is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing

£25.00 hardback
156 pages, 200mm x 150mm
ISBN: 9781916915091
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Caroline Furneaux is a photographer and writer based in London. Furneaux is interested in the interplay between words and images and the symbiotic relationship between photography and literature. On its way to becoming a book, images from The Mothers I Might Have Had have been shown at FORMAT International Photography Festival and featured in the RPS Journal of Contemporary Photography. This is Furneaux’s first book.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses and in person workshops begin in May, 2025. More information here. Follow him on Instagram