Man-sized

I am the father to two young daughters and no, I have never been pregnant and carried a foetus to term; I have never given birth. But I do not believe that this makes me less of a parent than a mother who has. I was the first human-being to see my first daughter’s face at birth. I caught her as her mother stood bent over the delivery bed, pushing and screaming in ecstatic agony to bring her into this world. I held her against my naked chest for an hour or so shortly after her birth. I have fed her, changed her nappy, read her to sleep, risen in the night to settle her, and tried to teach her that being a girl in a patriarchal world should not limit her aspirations.

At three days old, the usual jaundice symptoms had not entirely faded, not only yellowish in the tone of her skin, but excessively sleepy even when wide awake, so we returned to the hospital as advised. The paediatrician wanted to check for meningitis and we watched in terror as he folded her in half and conducted a lumbar puncture with a large needle to extract spinal fluid. Thankfully the test came back negative. However, she was admitted with severe jaundice for urgent treatment under UV light.

In a private room she had to lie in a crib under a panel of UV lights in nothing but a nappy, around the clock. Her mother and I were not supposed to remove her apart from for feeding. There was one high-backed chair in the room in which we took turns to sleep briefly when we could during the week she was there. Sometimes we gave in after hours of her crying despite our soothing and singing, and picked her up for a cuddle and comfort: feeling both guilty and perfect, we couldn’t indulge too long. The doctors needed to take blood samples three times a day to check her bilirubin levels. These invasive intravenous extractions were often taken by junior doctors who frequently had to have two or three attempts to get enough blood as we restrained her writhing, objecting body. Each needle would cause screaming and distress in our babe only a few days young.

By the end of seven days we were distraught and our days-old baby had pin marks on both wrists, inner elbows, back of the knees and the soles of her feet, more like a seasoned heroin addict than a new born baby. I remember leaving the hospital with her and thinking if someone said to me, to save her, or even just to stop her suffering, they would need just one of my limbs, my response would have been “take whichever one you need”.

This was eleven years ago and yet still I am in floods of tears as I write this and recall and relive those early days. I know that people experience much worse than this. I am grateful for her precious health and life, but to be a parent, a father and to not be able to protect my absent children sometimes seems to make pointless my existence.

Notes on the image making process…

I have spoken before of the difficulties in making images with oneself as the subject. Again, though it is not the technical challenges which are the greatest. In fact, it is not being able to see what the camera sees, the pose, the expression that are manifesting in the images. To deal with this challenge I enlisted the help of my partner Nicky to help direct me and to press the shutter release button. Nicky and I have talked at great length about the ideas behind my work and the images I wanted to make. I am able to trust that she understands what it is that I am trying to achieve and that she will give me feedback to reach that goal. I’m not sure if I would have been able to create an image I was as happy with if I had not had her assistance and input…

I knew of course that I had to push my stomach out, to distend it as far as possible (although it would also be later enhanced in software) and that I wanted to lovingly cradle my belly and to gaze adoringly at the fictional being within. But to get a sense of the weight of a babe in-utero, she could see that I had to really try and feel how that would change my physicality, and that to express this convincingly I needed to imagine how the weight would effect my stance, feeling it through my legs, also that I needed to drop my front shoulder to open up and soften my pose. While creating the most effective poses, I felt a lot less natural than the images appear but in the final analysis, the contortions were worth every physically awkward second…

With Nicky’s direction I was able feel confident that we could shoot several frames making minor changes in pose before I needed to review the images to see if more significant and structural changes were required. I was much more easily able to reach a position of knowing that I had enough to work with and could move onto lighting and posing another image. Thank you Nicky for helping to give birth to this image.