Hero, Father, Friend

"Hero, Father, Friend" reimagines my late father’s absence, blending memories and wishes into a photographic commentary on Black fatherhood. Exploring love, legacy, & the mundane, it reshapes fatherhood as a gift, celebrating the care that shaped my life.

After 18 years with my father, we barely had any photographs together and now that he’s no more, my memories of him feel a little distant. Photography as a form wasn’t as democratized as we have it today, so family albums did not fully capture the intimacy in the mundane beyond the four walls of a photo studio. Hero, Father, Friend, a biopic of my father and a photographic commentary on Black fatherhood and the archives, is meant to materialize those lost memories with my dad. With this body of work, I also paint a wishful picture of all the plans my dad and I never got to realize, and invite the audience to appreciate the different silhouettes of Black fatherhood and sonship which have gone undocumented.

Here, I hope to celebrate fatherhood as a gift that we experience in different forms, be it from uncles or Pastors who have impacted us deeply, and as an opportunity to affect a life beyond s and a time beyond now. Those moments at the beach with my uncle, piano lessons with my grandfather and football with older cousins filled the void of my father’s absence. I believe Black fathers are central to the Black family portrait, and over here I explore the potential of the genre to reshape our notions of fatherhood from a role of burden, to a lifelong journey of love, legacy and honour.

We typically see photography as a means to document the story of another, where the photographer is a fly on the wall. However, with this body of work, I seek to tell my own story by being both the photographer and the figurative subject – where these stories are mine not only because I photographed them but also because I once lived in these moments and wished they would last forever. I also seek to push the envelope of what the photographer finds worth noticing in Black portraiture, inviting us to treat the mundane and monumental with the same amount of care.

Ultimately, with Hero, Father, Friend, I continue in my bid as an artist to reimagine the ever-changing landscapes of Black life by blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, the tangible and the abstract, our fondest memories and our deepest desires.