Picture Book: A Survey of Family Photography: Photographing My Father

"I can remember the peculiar feeling I had looking at the first pictures that I made of him. I was recreating him and, like a parent with an infant, I had the power to observe him knowing that I would not be observed myself. Photographing my father became a way of confronting my confusion about what it is to be a man in this culture."

- Larry Sultan, from "Pictures from Home" (18).

In January of 2010, I began photographing my father. Over the past decade, I have made a number of portraits of myself, my two sisters, my mother, and my grandmother, but never him. As the sole male member of our immediate family, he has always been something of an outsider surrounded by women. Additionally, since he graduated from college, my father has worked as a traveling telephone pole salesman. It is the job that brought him to Texas, my birthplace, and where he still lives today with my mom and his mom.

Growing up, Dad was often on the road. His territory extended northwest to Colorado, through Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri, down south through Memphis, circling back home to Houston by way of New Orleans. When the company he worked for all his career laid him off a few years back, he staved off early retirement by joining forces with his previous competitor. He is still on the road and claims to have a few more years of driving and flying and selling left in him.

As a photographer, I often travel on road trips in search of new photographs. Only recently has it occurred to me that this impulse to explore America, at least on some level, is my attempt to retrace my father's steps. My current project, and the reason why I final turned my lens on the man himself, revolves around the idea of the lone business traveler. I am interested in exploring, through my perspective as a daughter and a photographer, the private life and solitary memories of a man who has lived, in part, on the road. That is not to say that I am in search of the literal truth, but rather my version of it. As much as this work with my father is a collaboration and we have discussed my motivations, it is at its core my perspective. As Irving Sultan, Larry's father, said to his son in the pages of "Pictures from Home": "Honestly, I'm happy to help you with your project, but for the most part that's not me that I recognize in those pictures...What you call introspection looks to me like lost, empty...I'm not melancholy...I think that's your fantasy" (Sultan 114).

And what exactly are my motivations with this work? As much as I aim for this work to be about the archetype of "the salesman", collective loneliness, and the desperation and disillusionment of becoming obsolete, I can not fully separate my photographer role from my identity as a daughter. While I hope that this project when complete will speak to a larger idea beyond my family unit, I am just happy and grateful for these images of my dad. As Andre Bazin stated, "photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time" (9). That impulse to stop time has always been there. It is why I photograph so much every time I go home. Like Sultan, and I would argue like any photographer who photographs his or her family, "I want my parents to live forever" (Sultan 18).