Days With My Father by Phillip Toledano
I began shooting ‘Days with my father’ about a year after my mother died. The purpose became clearer, as time progressed. It was to make a still film. An abstract assortment of linked recollections. My father’s stories, and how he told them. His eyes, when he was going to say something funny. His white hair, in the afternoon sun. I wanted to remember the personality that shone through the haze of his fading memory. And I wanted to revel in his humor, that had remained hidden for years in the strong shadow of parenthood. I wanted to record all of this, before he died. To document the love between us, and by reflection, the love we both had for my mother. This is not a story of death, but a story of life. Our life together for three years. I posted the work on the web in the late summer of 2008. Somehow it felt easier to talk to an audience I couldn’t see.-especially as I didn’t expect anyone to be listening. To my surprise, after a few days, I started getting 15,000 visits a day, then 21,000. The numbers kept climbing. I began to receive hundreds of emails. People sent me photos of their fathers, or their grandfathers. As old men, and as young men, before they were fathers. To date, over a million people have been to the site. I’ve gotten thousands of emails from all over the world, and from all kinds of people. Grandparents, parents, teenagers. Over two hundred thousand comments have been posted on the site. I read the new comments every few days, and each time I do, I feel deeply grateful. Grateful for people’s honesty, and proud that I’ve done something that helps people. People who want to reconnect with their father, after years of silence. Teenagers who see their own parents, or grandparents, in a new light. People whose parents died, but never had a chance to say goodbye. Loosing both my parents before I was forty has been very hard indeed. But that pain has been softened, by the gentle and honest voices of the thousands of people who spoke to me, from every country, and of every age.Follow up: Quite a while ago I posted a link to the marvellous images by Phillip Toledano which many of you have visited and told me you loved. Here is a short piece via bitemagazine by the artist.
