Birthing Change
"Mission Statement for a (Photo) Project: Having a child is hard. Not only in the pure, physical responsibility, but also psychologically. Axioms and basic truths premised upon experience are upended in an instant. All of life is reopened for questioning, for re-exploration, and its suddenness is breathtaking in its brutality.
And as you are breaking down and rebuilding, so the familiar around you mutates into something new. What was large is now small, closed, constricted. And what was open and free is now daunting and threatening and filled with danger and potential menace at worst, inconvenience at best.
This is not about claustrophobia or agoraphobia per-se. This is rather concerned with the fluidity of my own interpretation of familiar spaces - of my life - when assaulted from outside by this new permanent resident within it."
I began this abandoned project following the birth of my daughter in 2011. The above was my mission statement to come to terms with what, at the time, was so overwhelming. I rediscovered it today following a visit to The Photographers' Gallery's exhibition "Home Truths" concerning women's sense of identity following birth. I was trying to do the same thing from a father's perspective...
Birthing Change
"Mission Statement for a (Photo) Project: Having a child is hard. Not only in the pure, physical responsibility, but also psychologically. Axioms and basic truths premised upon experience are upended in an instant. All of life is reopened for questioning, for re-exploration, and its suddenness is breathtaking in its brutality.
And as you are breaking down and rebuilding, so the familiar around you mutates into something new. What was large is now small, closed, constricted. And what was open and free is now daunting and threatening and filled with danger and potential menace at worst, inconvenience at best.
This is not about claustrophobia or agoraphobia per-se. This is rather concerned with the fluidity of my own interpretation of familiar spaces - of my life - when assaulted from outside by this new permanent resident within it."
I began this abandoned project following the birth of my daughter in 2011. The above was my mission statement to come to terms with what, at the time, was so overwhelming. I rediscovered it today following a visit to The Photographers' Gallery's exhibition "Home Truths" concerning women's sense of identity following birth. I was trying to do the same thing from a father's perspective...