phillip toledano

I have posted a link to Phil Toledano's body of work, "Days With My Father" before, but for those of you who might have missed it, please take another look. After having recently read the following in The New Yorker, I got to thinking about the work again and decided to give it a second shot here.

"The premise is simple: after Toledano’s mother died, in 2006, Toledano started taking photographs of his father, documenting their relationship in what would be his father’s final years. 'I took very few pictures, maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty total,' Toledano said. 'I didn’t want the picture-taking process to overwhelm being with my father.' After a while, Toledano started posting the photos on a blog, along with simple text, some funny, some painful. The response was overwhelming; to date, viewers from around the world have left more than ten thousand comments on the series, a testament to its unforced emotional power.

The pictures are spare and unstudied. 'I like photographs to be like unfinished sentences,' Toledano said. 'I want the person looking to fill in the other half.' Toledano’s father hated them. 'It was hilarious,' Toledano said. 'I’d just taken a picture for The New Yorker, actually, and I told him that, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s fantastic. What else are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m taking these photographs of you and me, and documenting our lives together.’ And he said, ‘Oh, that sounds great. You’re a genius! Show me these pictures.’ So I bring them out, and he looks at them, and after a couple of minutes he goes, ‘These are terrible!’ And then he said, ‘You’re gonna be at the bottom of the pile if you don’t wake up. You gotta wake up!’ I said, ‘What happened, a minute ago I was a genius, and now I’m at the bottom of the pile?’ (It didn’t go much better when Toledano told his father that he’d put the photos on the Internet. 'What’s the Internet?' he said. 'Is it in color?')

Whatever his father’s reaction, the important thing, Toledano said, was the focused time they spent together. 'It took my mom dying to make me take pictures of my father,' Toledano said. 'Over the past few years, both my parents died, my aunt died, my uncle—everyone croaked simultaneously, like an asteroid hit the Toledano section of the continent. One of the things I realized after the Toledano mass extinction is that all of the clichés are true, which is really annoying. When they say that your parents might be gone tomorrow, the people you love might be gone in a second, so the time you have with them is really important—it’s all true.'

Here’s a sample—but note that what really makes the series work is the combination of words and pictures. You can view the whole project at Toledano’s blog, or in the book 'Days with My Father.'"

-The New Yorker