mr. toledano: searching for his future

I love pretty much any project Phil Toledano does. In his latest, he's turned himself (with lots of assistance) into a myriad of possible older versions of himself.

From Slate.com:

By his own account, Phil Toledano was leading a charmed life. But in 2006 his mother suddenly passed away. A few years later his father, as well as some of his aunts and uncles, did too.

“It was an extinction event in the Toledano family,” he said. “When it happened, I became apprehensive. What else did life have in store for me? What other dark terrible turns? I began to worry about it more and more and I thought, Fuck it, I can just worry about it, I have to confront this fear, whatever it was. I wanted to anticipate the worst things that could possibly happen to me.”

Against the advice of his wife, Carla, who feared working on this project might push an already fragile Toledano over the edge, he began a photo series—a journey, really—that dove straight into those fears. A book of these photos, called Maybe, was released by Dewi Lewis Publishing this month.

Toledano knew it would be “lunacy” to try to predict the future, so he turned to science and mysticism: He got a DNA test to find out what illnesses he was likely to get. He consulted with fortune-tellers, astrologists, palm readers, and numerologists. He underwent hypnosis and researched insurance company statistics. All to try to figure out what bad things might be lurking around the corner to ruin his life.

For Toledano, throwing himself into work has always been a way to process what was happening in his life. He worked on a series about caring for his father, and recently completed a body of work that dealt with the loss of his sister when he was 6 years old.

“When I do projects it’s like being stuck in a gravity whirl of a planet, they just pull me toward them and I just have to do them,” he said. “I feel I’m lucky enough to be in this position where I can make art, whether people like it or not is another story. I feel a certain obligation to do it. This is my job and I have to produce work. In a way being an artist is kind of like drowning close to the shore, when you’re making work that’s you waving at the lifeguard saying ‘Here I am I’m dong something’ and if you don’t, you sink to the bottom and people forget about you and you disappear.”

While working on “Maybe,” Toledano took acting lessons in order to become darker versions of himself. The entire process was almost like producing a film: He scouted locations, cast extras, and hired makeup artists who spent hours a day doing prosthetic work.

One of the hardest images to make was one of the first ones, of him as an older man sitting in the park with his caretaker. “I would take my father to the park, and he would fall asleep and I would text my friends so I was being my father and that was really hard to do.”

But throughout the work, Toledano said one of the most fascinating aspects to the series was being able to see how the world saw him in all of his incarnations.

“We are used to how we’re seen in the world and so when you suddenly have people look at you differently, it’s an extraordinary experience when you’re used to being seen in one way for 25 or 30 years; the whole project is not about the final art the photographs, but really about the performance, the act of doing it.”

Once he was done working on “Maybe,” Toledano felt a lot lighter and he no longer felt afraid of the things that had bothered him enough to create work about them. It was a highly reflective time for him.

“What’s interesting is, as you get older you begin to consider your future more, when you’re younger you’re oblivious to your future; when you’re older your future becomes more tangible and fragile, people die you get married have kids you fall in love with people, and things become more serious … a lot of my art is I talk about very obvious things.”

new old photo

I've been left behind in the dust when it comes to tweeting, twerking, smirking, instagramming, etc.

I noticed recently that Phil Toledano has been posting (strictly on Instagram) images he didn't use in the series about his father "Days With My Father" (which I adore) - images he really liked but that didn't make it in to the book. Or that simply help reveal what was happening in his head during the "process" of working on the project. It's really interesting to see them. There's one of an empty chair, presumably his father's, made while Toledano was cleaning out his father's apartment after he died. It's simple and poignant and powerful and sad and beautiful.

The energy involved in posting things like that to Instagram, then tweeting about them, doesn't really appeal to me, I guess. So I stick to my blog and to Facebook and hope that those who want to see what I'm working on will find me.

This is an image I rediscovered earlier today while combing through older files. I'm working on a couple projects that require visiting the "oldies"and I was very pleased to run across this previously overlooked image I made in Uganda. Maybe there will be more to come!

But don't look for them on Instagram. At least not yet...

the reluctant father

As I wait and wait and wait some more (Abbie is now eight days past her due date, my grandchild taking his/her own sweet time) I am finding all sorts of things to do to pass the time. Like look at Phil Toledano's latest project about his forray in fatherhood with baby Loulou. You've got to check out this series ("The Reluctant Father") at The Anthropologist. His writing, per usual, is as wonderful as his photographs.

(Dear son-in-law Sam: I know you are anything but reluctant about what is about to hit you, but I also feel quite sure you will love this series.)

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

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Four years ago when my mother was diagnosed with leukemia, I set about making photographs of the house I grew up in, the house where my parents still lived. I had just turned six when we moved into this house; I still return there to this day to be with my dad.

I was inspired to post images after seeing a series photographs by Phillip Toledano entitled “Days With My Father" a moving and wonderful body of work that my friend Aline Smithson recently featured on her blog.

These pictures, while they aren’t about my folks specifically, are about the details of the home they created and shared with my siblings and me. They are about the quiet, still moments that existed/exist in a space that is as familiar to me as my own breathing.