“aLMA PATER”

My dad is the most interesting person I’ve met in my life. This series was developed over a few months that I spent with him in San Diego and Colorado. I have a lot to say about these photos, so humor me. And don’t feel like you have to read about them all. I just wanted to write about them all.

(first) - “Nosebleeds”

My great-grandmother was born on November 11th, 1918 and lived until she was 106. My dad has always said that she was the most present and reliable woman in his life, a real matriarch whose memorial was attended by fifty people. We sat in the back, in the nosebleeds, on the outskirts of the family as the Flynns generally are.

At the core: my uncles, my aunts and my Grandpa Rick. What struck me was that my dad, just as close with his grandmother as the rest, chose to sit in the back. Whether it was borne from emotional closure, or a desire to not draw attention to himself, I can’t parse. Photographed are my dad and his son (also my brother, but principally, his son). The former wipesa wordless tear from his vigil-candle face. 

(second) - “My Dad and His Son”

A truth about my dad: he was raised in a trailer-park. He was born in San Diego, on his older sister’s birthday. His father left when he was one. His mother moved them to the tumbleweed, 2000-person town of Wickenburg and left when he was eight. He was raised by with six other children by a man called Rick Blakeley, my Grandpa Rick, in the Arizonan heat.

(third) - “Girls Don’t Grill”

Another truth about my dad: he’s eternally busy, categorically scatterbrained, and shows affection through cooking. It’s something I wasn’t aware of for the first tensome years of my life. He used to make jokes about how he’s ‘not a short-order cook’, but in looking back, I remember how he would take care to scramble my morning eggs, fry my brothers’, and poach my sister’s. There was also a time, that we laugh about a lot, where he spent six months making different variations of meringue, every night demanding that we sample his newest batch. To this day, none of us have eaten meringue since. In those six months, we ate enough to turn us off them for life.

I took this photo in January. We went to visit my sick grandfather in Colorado, and in the freezing cold of the morning, my dad was outside at the grill fixing him tri-tip steak. A scene (and an act) that is so identifiably my dad that it makes me homesick with love for him.

(fourth) - “Kenhouse (At Night)”

My desert dad (like many) longed for California his whole life. By forty-five, he had saved enough money to build his dream home in San Diego. And so he did, and since I moved to the United States at eighteen, I have lived in his Kenhouse. Photographed is my brother and our family dog, each on either side of the sliding doors that separate the dining room (a round table by the stove) and the backyard. My brother is making me dinner, and my dog (and I) are watching. If you choose to look closely, you’ll see my brother at the fridge door.