My Dad

These lines are the first of a longer introduction of a future book project. The book project focuses on my love to Asia and how photography has made for me Asia the most interesting, attractive and never ending place on the earth to live and how without knowing it at the time, my father inspired me to take up a camera and see, not just to look and to hear, not just listen.




"My Father had a camera. We sat at dark winter evenings in front of 35mm slides projected on a white roll curtain screen and watched ourselves in swim suits on rocky shores, in hay at some farm stay, always with sunburned faces. These moments were for me magical and I clearly remember those unexposed rolls of film standing there in the cupboard over the sink waiting to be processed. Sometimes it took weeks or even months (that's what it felt like anyways) for my father to get it done and come home with an envelope of prints. He wasn’t really a great photographer my father but he did have the spirit to document our first years, mine and my sisters. He told me once that he got this Contax 35 mm camera with 2 lenses as payment for a car he repaired, he once got a fishing rod and roll as payment. He wasn’t a very good business man my father.

I did never have the chance to talk about photography with him but I have come to understand that he was like me really drawn to images. The bookshelves back home in the house were filled with books, most of them cheap hardcover novels, also an encyclopedia as well as lots of books with photographs in them. I don’t think my father really knew any famous photographers name or what was hot on the photo marker at the time, but the books there in the bookshelf was of a photographic nature and I used to love to flip through them all. Why did I never ask him about his camera, why did I never ask him to teach how to use it? It was like I couldn’t connect the camera with those magical moments on dark winter evenings in front of warm grass, cold lemonade and bright nights with the rest of the family.

I guess most with families with kids fight a lot, we fought a lot, my sisters, and me and gave our mother a daily headache. But in the images my father showed us everything was always happy and uplifting. He chose to filter out the dark and negative and maybe for him just capture the dream he must have had when he decided to have a family on his own. My parents were young when they had us and from pretty modest families themselves so I can’t really blame them for being naïve, sticking to that dream we could see was real, at least in my father’s images. A reminder to us that moments were sunny, bright and loving as well."......





Miss you man!