The Last Photograph

My father, a sheet of mylar, and a passing of the torch I didn't see coming.

“I wanted to be close to my mother,” my father explained, a subtle joke spoken with the dryness of 100 grit sandpaper on a pine plank. One hundred and eighteen years ago, on 14 April 1908, a new baby popped out of a womb in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The joke took years for me to understand and years before I could tell the same joke about my birthplace in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the United States of America.

I felt the distance, at first the geographical, trying to understand why he was born in Canada and I was born in the United States, questions that were never answered, then the psychological — the push to become your own creature, the pull that never wanted you to leave. After a while the answers no longer mattered.

My Dad tested me to understand his humor, an invisible test of intelligence. But I could barely laugh because that would ruin the joke. I would smile and nod, signalling my comprehension and secretly begging for more. That was the basis of our relationship. Silent lessons, guidance from afar, and that goddamn dry humor.

Once, he told me “the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind” and anyone I’ve ever photographed will tell you I have a boisterous infectious laugh, the kind of laugh you would expect from a stuffed animal when you push the belly button, my super-power to make models and CEOs smile for the camera. Years later, perplexed, long after he died, I wondered if my Dad was just trying to tell me that I was stupid?

The image below continues to intrigue me, the last photograph I took of my father. We were in the pool together and I had brought a large sheet of flexible mylar, maybe three feet in width and six feet long. We were just laughing about nothing and I asked if I could wrap him inside the mylar fully expecting a firm “No” but he acquiesced immediately, in a way that went beyond “Yes” in the most meaningful way. Yet I could not place any sentiment one way or another, the “Yes” in my mind now was a passing of the torch whatever that torch may be.

I love the way his body and head are warped by the mylar, like a funhouse mirror but so much more. I see his mind, his soul now, becoming part of a much larger consciousness, a man who guided me for twenty-five years would transform in just a few months into an otherworldly consciousness that would envelop me to this day.

Yes, I’m crying as I write this, I’ve thought about this image for the last 44 years yet I haven’t put pen to paper until now.

I just miss the f@Ck out of him.