Raising Kids

A documentary series about raising three boys, in which no identifiable child appears. That constraint is not a workaround for a privacy problem. It is the form of the project.

Children leave a legible record. A shoe pile by the door, a hat left on a fence, marks worn into the bottom of a slide, an empty net at the end of a hockey box, a bin of gear a parent set out an hour early. Those things describe an afternoon as precisely as a photograph of the afternoon would, and they describe it without asking a seven-year-old to consent to something he cannot yet consent to. The work is shot as evidence and as infrastructure: mostly outdoors, in whatever light is there, nothing arranged, nothing moved before the exposure, focus deep enough that the whole thing is described rather than suggested.

The tonal risk in this material is obvious and I work against it deliberately. Objects standing in for an absent child read as grief the moment the light gets sombre, and this is not a project about grief. It is about affection and chaos. So the grade is warm-neutral and even, shadows stay open, saturation sits one notch under instinct, and nothing is crushed for drama. The mess is the subject, so the mess is never cleaned up: no marks healed, no clutter removed, no detail invented by a sharpening or fill tool. Fix the capture, never the mess.

The pictures are not on this site. The series is intended as a book, it is early, and sequencing it in public would settle questions I would rather leave open for another year or two. If you are a curator, editor or publisher and want to see the work in progress, ask.