Days With My Father by Phillip Toledano (April 21, 2010) 
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Categories / Documentary Portraiture / Human Interest / / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / 1 Comment
Between Son And Father
To date, over a million people have been visiting to the site of Phil Toledano´s Day with My Father. It’s no wonder. Phil Toledano is known of his conceptual work which is witty, social commentary on the present times. His very personal project Days With My Father is simply from another world. This documentary is intimate, soft, human and revealing. When I saw this serie for the first time, I cried. I cried because becoming old isn’t always a pretty picture. We tend to push the sick and old ones somewhere where the camera nor the eye ever goes. At least, in western society getting old is something that we all try to avoid. Toledano is a master photographer and he is never careless with his photographs. You can see that he spends an excessive amount of time thinking what kind of message he wants to deliver. But these photographs are more like drawn with a free hand. Here you can just see the respectful and loving relationship between a son and a father.
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I began shooting ‘Days with my father’ about a year after my mother died. The purpose became clearer, as time progressed. It was to make a still film. An abstract assortment of linked recollections.
My father’s stories, and how he told them. His eyes, when he was going to say something funny. His white hair, in the afternoon sun. I wanted to remember the personality that shone through the haze of his fading memory. And I wanted to revel in his humor, that had remained hidden for years in the strong shadow of parenthood. I wanted to record all of this, before he died. To document the love between us, and by reflection, the love we both had for my mother. This is not a story of death, but a story of life. Our life together for three years.
I posted the work on the web in the late summer of 2008. Somehow it felt easier to talk to an audience I couldn’t see.-especially as I didn’t expect anyone to be listening. To my surprise, after a few days, I started getting 15,000 visits a day, then 21,000. The numbers kept climbing. I began to receive hundreds of emails. People sent me photos of their fathers, or their grandfathers. As old men, and as young men, before they were fathers.
To date, over a million people have been to the site. I’ve gotten thousands of emails from all over the world, and from all kinds of people. Grandparents, parents, teenagers. Over two hundred thousand comments have been posted on the site. I read the new comments every few days, and each time I do, I feel deeply grateful. Grateful for people’s honesty, and proud that I’ve done something that helps people. People who want to reconnect with their father, after years of silence. Teenagers who see their own parents, or grandparents, in a new light. People whose parents died, but never had a chance to say goodbye.
Loosing both my parents before I was forty has been very hard indeed. But that pain has been softened, by the gentle and honest voices of the thousands of people who spoke to me, from every country, and of every age.
Phillip Toledano (1968) lives and works in USA.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by tammydavid: One of my all time fave stories RT @Bite_magazine: New post: This Is Not A Story Of Death, But A Story Of Life http://cli.gs/qsmNV...