NATALYA REZNIK
‘Looking for my father’
My mother was always dreaming of an ideal man. When we were watching movies of 60-70’s with french and italian actors (Belmondo, Delon, Mastroianni, Marais), she was always excited and often said to me «I always liked that kind of man!».
I was always interested to meet my father. Last time i saw him when I was three years old. I decided to reflect this idea using photography. I do not remember how he looked like, I do not have any image of him in my memory, I rather try to «find» him by means of photography, to create memories which i never had — memories about family with my father.
She met my father in Sochi, it was a «resort» roman, which soon ended up with a marriage. She did not know much of him, only that he was a captain and worked somewhere at North Russia. They never lived together. He usually came for a few weeks and then dissapeared. At some point my mother found out that he has another wife and a child. She could never forgive him and soon they divorced.
In her albums there was almost no photo left of my father — not only she divorced with him, but also destroyed all the photos of him including those from the wedding day. However, I was able to find a few images from an old black and white passport photo machine. They were together on this shots, however one can not really see his face — images are quite small and he always wears «aviator» glasses. He looked like a young Belmondo. On these images they are kidding together, kissing each other and smile a lot. One of those photos I kept for my self (my mother never liked this and was trying to find out why I want to have his photo for a long time) and since then keep it in my wallet.
Really, what for do i need this photo? Sometimes I just want to look at it and imagine that my father, although i never met him, was as beautiful as Belmondo. On some occations I proudly show this photo to friends («My partents in the ’70s»). Even if this photo never existed, I should have created it in Photoshop.
This project is very personal, somewhere inbetween documentary and fiction, where the dreams of my mother are real, but the memory, I created for myself based on them, is fictional. I used in the project old photos from the album of my mother and reconstructed our new memory “with the father” using the portraits of movie-stars from the ’70s.
© Natalya Reznik