Portrait of an Invisible Man. 1993-2003.
Twenty six years ago, I was commissioned by Val Williams to produce work about my troubled relationship with my father for the Barbican exhibition, ‘Who’s Looking at The Family’. At the time I wrote, “For thirty-eight years I have carried this man inside me. He is a man I recognise but know nothing about. He is a man with no known history. A man of secrets and suspicion. A detached man. A lonely man? A man of greed and sarcasm. A silent man. A man of hypocrisy. A man of lies and double standards. An unemotional man. A dying man. The man is my father. For as long as I can remember my father has been an ‘absent presence’ in my life. Only ever there on Sundays and even then, a sleeping, silent figure in an armchair. Who was this man? Where did he go?..”
Armed with a camera (an effective weapon/barricade) and the courage of a 38-year-old son, I returned to my childhood home to face the foreboding presence of him. I tried to make photographs that spoke of the emotional and psychological impact of this man on my life. Photographs that attempted to define the shape of my childhood, such as the image of ‘the stone’. A stone embedded in a piece of waste ground next to the house where I would spend hour upon hour digging in an effort to get to the bottom of it, trying to establish its shape and size. With hindsight, what an effective metaphor that act had become for the process of trying to uncover my identity. I photographed a moth trapped in a spiders’ web in the bathroom. At the time I saw the moth as being me: held in a suspended state waiting for the return.
Only recently have I realised that the image of the moth also represents the entrapment of my father. Indeed, these early photographs only ever looked at the behaviour never the cause. They poked around in the shadow this man had cast upon my life but never considered the reasons my father might be the way he is. His strange obsessive-compulsive behaviour, like his refusal to ever throw anything away: drawers full of un- opened Christmas presents and thousands of plastic bags, the mood swings, the loud recurring nightmares and the suspicion and distrust of everybody. But it wasn’t all photographs: much of my father’s life was to be revealed. Like the other family in Leeds. The half sister I never new I had. The fact that ‘Reas’ was not the family name but one which was adopted by my fathers’ mother (a woman I never met) from a man she knew when her and my father lived in the U.S.A.
And so, ten years since the original work, I went back to the house. Only this time it was empty: my parents having just been re-housed because the estate was to be demolished. Roaming around those bare rooms I could still feel the atmosphere of my childhood: trapped like dirt in the carpet. I felt like I was running out of time. I began the re-questioning of my father. Only this time I wouldn’t be intimidated by the silence. I would persist. Slowly. Very slowly, from the fading memory of a man who had locked things up for so long, a story started to emerge. The story of a fifteen-year-old boy (a boy the age my own son is now) who lied about his age to join the army at the beginning of World War 2. A boy who, as a paratrooper was involved in acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. A boy who, at the age of 18, was captured in Italy and transported across Europe to Poland. A boy who was held temporarily in a P.O.W camp until his “crime” against the Nazi Regime was discovered. As a soldier involved in “subversive” activity against the Third Reich my father was not afforded the protection of the Geneva Convention. And so, it was that this boy was loaded onto a cattle truck and transported, with women and children, to Auschwitz. On arrival he went through the process of “selection”. He was one of the lucky ones, he was assigned to work, along with 350 other allied troops, in the camps nearby factories. It was from one of these factories that, remarkably, he managed to escape. Travelling east under the cover of darkness he embarked on a long and harrowing journey where reason and morality were overtaken by the instinct to survive.
This was a story, which was painstakingly pieced together, each fact and item of information being corroborated by endless trips to the Imperial War Museum, returning with archival material in an effort to stimulate his memory. Through long protracted conversations we connected in a way we’d never done before. Slowly all the resentment and pain on my part disappeared and all that was left was pity and understanding. It now all made sense: the detachment, the secrets, the obsessional behaviour...These were all coping strategies of a man struggling to fit back into civilised society.
