Days With My Father, a beautiful series of work by photographer Phillip Toledano, archives the enlightening moments shared between the widowed Toledano patriarch and his son. (via mindsink)
I was walking through the Esplanade basement to the city connect and I slowed down for a while to see this because… I don’t know. I can’t explain it either but I felt something in me feel like becoming more than the insensitive teenager I knew I was because age gets the best of us. This man above was once an athlete in his prime, a big strong sturdy and invincible man. And how he looks now, it gets to me; one of the captions of the photographs read about him always being vain, looking in the mirror sadly wondering where his dashing good looks had gone. A bit heartwrenching, the decline (do I dare say that? It’s only decline if you believe so) but the extreme sadness, yearning and pensiveness in his eyes stopped me short in my tracks and let me have a seance with my grandmother for a second or two and she reminded me: it’s not always the externalities that count, it’s your own person. Rejuvenated I continued on to a photograph where he was covered in soap suds, smiling as though he was a freshly-bathed toddler just emanating joy and sweet floral smells used to lave the delicate skin of both the very young and very old. I was suddenly so aware of the concept of mortality and every time I walk by someone, I think of their lives and what they are doing with theirs, and what I am doing with my own in comparison. Will I become a person of worth? Someone who could be loved so whole-heartedly by someone else? Will I one day mean so much to someone who holds me so dear that I will be immortalised in my own series of photographs? I won’t know that but I’ve felt something so important and necessary for me to feel… an awareness of something else. To not be deficient or disabled by anything, and love.
