Ep 023: Pat Martin
A SHOT: So to start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to be talking about?
PAT MARTIN: It is a portrait of my biological father after not speaking to him for 10 years. The 10 years of silence between us, it was mutual, but it was also something that, in our relationship, the rug was pulled out from under me. I met him when I was 18 for the fourth or fifth time in my life, and then shortly after, he decided he wanted nothing to do with my mom. So I lost touch with him after there was an aggressive conversation with him. He cursed me out, and without the nitty-gritty stuff, he stopped talking to me, and then my mom passed away. Well, years later my mom passed away. He had said nothing to me, and it dawned on me about a year and a half after my mom’s passing that he still hadn’t been in touch. That thought and vibration, I guess is a way to put it, it was keeping me up at night, and I had this thought of taking a portrait of my father for years, but it always, in my memory or in my dream and my memory of a dream of taking a picture of him, I was always kicking his ass. So I never really got far in thinking about conceptually what it would be.
After a whole week of wrestling with “I haven’t heard from him, and I don’t know how to get in touch with him,” I found his phone number. It was positive conversation, and a few days later, I was at his house in the desert in Riverside [California]. He lives there with his wife and three kids, three daughters, and they also have children of their own, so he’s a grandfather. I think there was about eight or seven of them under one roof. He was just really happy and honestly proud when he saw me, which took me for a whole spin in what I was expecting to confront when I arrived. I’m a very dive-in-the-deep-end type of person when it comes to obsession and thought. I’ll get to a point where it’s kind of like, “Alright, I’m tired of thinking about this. Eff it. Let’s go.” He and I were just sharing happy conversation for a couple hours before we ended up in his backyard, and I had my camera in my hand, so I just started photographing him, and he was smiling the whole time. I asked him to stop smiling, and he said, “Why?” And I was like, “Well, I would like a straightforward gaze at me. I’d like you just to look at me.” And he said, “Well, I’m looking at you and thinking of my son. It’s making me happy.” It’s like, “Well, just try for a second.” And this was him trying.
So I think in that singular moment in our universe, it finally connected right where I like things to connect. And that’s the first I would say I’m reflecting on photography as that connection point and that singular moment when it’s correct. So this portrait is now… It’s a reflection of a lot of what was behind it for me but an example of that resilience, too.
How much of your mind was wanting to make a photo that day, and how much of your mind was wanting to connect with him?
I would like to believe it was fifty-fifty, but that’s how I probably like to land in most situations — somewhere at a neutral zero that can bend either way. And as a photographer, as a professional portrait photographer, if I’m in that hat, I want to be impressionable, so all those same thoughts went through my head and had an influence on what carried me through wanting to connect with him and then coming back with this artifact, but I also… I kind of went blackout when I got there, in a way where I was both in my portrait mind of “I want to get this picture; I want to get this picture,” and then also, “Whoa, this dude looks so much like me.” My eyes couldn’t get away from that, in a weird kind of terrifying way.
What else do you remember of the day, maybe even the time that you were spending with him before you started taking pictures?
I remember arriving to the house, and there was a squad of people outside of it in front, the neighbors from left and right houses, and there was no Covid protocol happening. There was no masks. There was nothing. And there were three cars that were all souped-up racer, like, body kits and stuff. He’s a mechanic who I know started his journey being a mechanic in the marines. (I know very little of his life details, kind of squat, even now.) He brought me to his garage and started just showing me around, showing me the pictures on his walls, pictures of himself, all of them looking very… well, the face that he’s making at the camera there — just tough — and then other ones where he’s smiling, and he looks like how he looks to me in person, which is funny because I showed him a stack of photos I had with me — prints that I had printed in my darkroom — and he looks at this one picture and says, “Who’s that?” I said, “That’s me.” And it’s me smiling, and I have a baseball cap on, clean shaven. And I guess I just didn’t look like who was standing in front of him, and he was like, “Nah, that’s not you.” I was like, “No, it’s me.” He goes, “Nah, that’s not you.” I said, “No that’s me.” And looking back at it, shit that hurt my feelings. He was looking at a picture of me and telling me that I didn’t look like that person.
He kept telling me that I looked like an actor, but he couldn’t tell me what actor I looked like. That was funny to me because I feel like in his language or just in his mind, that was his best way to say, “You’re handsome,” which was really nice. I came across some photos of him later, pictures of him and my mom, and he was a sharp-lookin’ dude. He was definitely a handsome dude. When we were speaking that day and just talking about stuff he started mentioning that back in the day, he used to be like a Sons of Anarchy guy, which, I’ve never seen that show, but I’m very familiar with those people. Growing up in Venice Beach [California], there’s just so much skinhead stuff around. I had friends who went that route, and then it made me want to leave Venice.
He grew up in LA, so I’m sure his past was pretty… I don’t have words to say, like, just not me, very much the opposite. Without putting him down, him and I, just different beliefs completely, anything from politics to… It was pretty funny — not funny; “funny” is my way to myself of saying I can only laugh about this because it was so uncomfortable — that he started talking about his homophobia, and to me, that was not surprising, but it was something that I was prepared to confront as I do on kind of any basis with who I am as a person. And the people around us, because we were talking to his neighbors, were also like, “Craig, what’s up with that?”
Yeah, and he brings me to his backyard after bringing me to his garage, and he introduced me to his neighbors. That’s when I grabbed my camera, started taking his picture, keep my camera in hand for pretty much the rest of our hangout, but the sun was setting pretty quickly. We run outside at some point to photograph him and his family and him and his wife, and those pictures were all very “family photo,” and I feel like, in that moment, I was trying to also make sure I get a photograph that he would like. I forgot about that. That just kind of happened instinctually.
I think when someone happens in front of my camera and I’m not sure about the picture I personally want to take, make, they both work, I will then think about “Well, what can I give them, and what would they like?” because the first person outside of myself that I’m trying to make an impression on or want to feel positively about the photograph is the person in it. Sometimes it’s more important to me than what I think about. Often times that’s what leads finishing an assignment because you’re pleasing multiple people — editors, celebrities.
What did you hope to create for yourself though with this? Like, before you’d taken any photos, when you were going in there, what did you have in mind of the image you wanted to make?
I feel like in an artistic way of speaking, I can say that I was trying to take the first and last photo that I might take of him. But in a very on-the-nose way of referencing something, I was just trying to take a scientific photo of him, something like August Sander, the way August Sander’s portfolios, they all hold together in this impression of humanity from the period of the Great Depression. I know with my father, seeing him end up in the portfolio with my family, at the end of the day, this is just going to be a journal record of my interaction with him. I didn’t have an aesthetic totally in mind for it, but I knew that I was going to try to hit all my marks where I’m photographing him when the sun was setting but just a little bit before. I got some shadow play in there, so it brings a little bit of gradient and mood. I got him to look right at me, which I feel like that’s when the two laser beams meet. That’s why I shot, like, four rolls of film that day, just moving around. I had him in my car at one point, photographed him pretty close, got close to his face, but it was too detailed. I photographed him in his bedroom. I have some pictures in his bedroom, too, him in a chair with my dog and a picture of his bathroom, which I think is pretty neat — not neat enough to share as an interesting photo but definitely a neat thing to look back on.
It’s interesting because I get the sense that you’re very strict about what you show of the things that you shoot, and from what you’re saying it sounds like you’ve created those other photos, but you’ve also made a choice that this is the one that you wanna show people, at least at this point. What about this image is the thing that makes it the photo for the day?
It hits all those aesthetic marks, but it has nothing that I feel like I would edit out. That’s kind of a big thing that leads to my photo editing process, just what is in the image that is not making me happy. Oftentimes somebody smiling at the camera, it doesn’t make me happy. But I don’t mind looking at those photos. When I’m behind the camera I’m constantly going between different states of mind of different photographer hats I have. Being a family photographer is a fun one to play at times because it kind of goes against everything that was leading my initial drive in my career at this point.
Was this photo difficult for you to take, and how difficult is it for you to tell him to stop smiling in an instance like that?
Not difficult. I feel like I get to a point where it’s two humans in the room, and if I’m putting all this work into putting film into my camera, and then I know the work that I’m going to do after I take the film out of the camera, I need that person who’s standing in front of it to try at least to meet me a little bit halfway. So I’m not going to take that picture until I feel like… I wanna make him feel comfortable, so that’s also why I’m taking some of him smiling. I think when I got to this moment, I put my camera down, and I looked at him. I told him what I want, and I kind of do it, like, I stand straight, and I look at him. I don’t know if there’s an intensity that comes with that seriousness or if it’s just like, “Oh, I can mirror that,” because I can kind of what I call “hit my photo-face.” I’ve been told by my friends, “You get in front of the camera, and you know what to do.” I’m like “I don’t know what to do. I just take a deep breath.” But it’s all about about just trying to hang out and document at the same time.
To some extent, maybe I’m asking “difficult” just because of who he is to you.
Yeah, absolutely. My friends were worried about me just meeting him in general, let alone going out there and trying to… I was using photography as an excuse somewhat to cushion it for myself. I think if I didn’t have a camera with me, I’d feel differently about the day. When I met him when I was 18, disposable pictures were taken, and when I look at those photos, I… They don’t do anything for me. And they make me sad, in a way. So I think for my memories to live in a state of positivity, it’s nicer when they can come through this perspective and I can land on an image that just hit it right in the middle. But it takes a lot of images around it to get there, oftentimes. Sometimes I can jump in the room and be ready. Other times like this, this was definitely difficult for me. I was nervous before, and my voice just cracked. My voice cracked because I’m remembering I had a few sleepless nights leading up to this.
Did anything surprise you about this image?
Tattoo placement. I guess that’s more something that surprised me in his details because my tattoos are placed pretty similarly. I only have four. I plan to get more, but I’m very much just on my biceps and chest. So it’s like, “Wow, we have that in common.” I think when I look at this picture, it feels like I’m looking in a mirror 40 years ahead, or 30 years ahead. And that to me is just freaky. But that must be how most people feel when they are around their parents. I wonder. At this point in my life, I can only wonder that. I can’t know that for sure.
I was surprised that the light hit just right, too. I love when the sun is setting but it’s behind a house or behind a tree and you get these gradients, so here I can tell he’s standing just in the path of the palm-tree shadow, so that’s what cuts his belly and bottom half.
How would you describe the mood or emotion in this photo?
It’s stern, stark, quiet. I think I only heard the wind at this moment when I was taking it.
How would you describe your presence behind the camera when you’re taking this photo? You’re saying that you’re wearing different photographer hat, so you’re taking pictures of him with his family or taking pictures of him in various situations, but what’s your presence when you’re taking this one?
I’m trying to take a photograph that I feel can live next to the photographs of my mom. I wanted to take a photograph that I could be able to put next to her, put next to the portraits that I’ve selected at this point, and see a picture of them together. That was my non-verbal creative push through this, trying to see the picture of them together. I have one picture of them together that was taken before I was born, but there are no pictures of them after. Maybe somebody has some pictures of them, but the album that I have that ends at my third birthday, which I then realized was the year my father left. And then I realized this recently that that album was made by him. So that’s why there are pictures of my mom in it, obviously. There are pictures of him in it because he’s putting himself in there but never pictures of them together. I have a picture of the three of us together, like in a photo booth. It’s very classic “We have a newborn baby.” I like pictures like that because they’re the most timeless to me.
Does this image change the way you regard your biological father in any way?
Yeah, for sure. Looking at him, looking at this memory for a long period, it’s like… I’ve described looking at photographs as a form of meditation to, like, transport to either that memory or state of mind — being there. When I get to reflect on this with any of my friends, I forget the 10 years of agony, the agony before we met. I was leading my life as if I would never meet my dad again, and I would say, “I could possibly never see him for the rest of my life and then that’s it, I just get a phone call.” But I was already pretty used to the fact that he wasn’t in my life and playing that song in my head was just another way of playing the tiniest violin in the world to myself. It was just like so melancholy. And now I don’t feel that as intensely, for sure.
In that same sense, is there anything about this photo that reinforces perceptions that you may have had of him already?
His body details. His beer belly. His weathered skin to me, it’s him tattooed by the sun. He spent so much time out there, and that, to me, just says “desert dude.” But it doesn’t bring to light anything negative to my mind. I feel very positive sitting and reflecting with it.
So I always love how dominant people are within the frames of your photos. It’s almost as if you’re kind of pushing them forward toward the viewer past the image, and even when you’re not super close to their face, the body always feels very present. How do you think about a person’s presence in an image?
I feel that I want, like, if I was in front of the camera and I was looking at a photograph of myself, I’d wanna feel lifted. I don’t wanna feel too seen. I also want as a photographer to be able to show, so it’s this intersection of all these different things happening all at once. It takes me a while to get there for sure, but when I land at the final state of a photograph, I feel like I wanna close in onto the details as most and best as I can without doing too much. That said, there’s a constant state of oscillation in something like that — wanting to show details, wanting to pull details back. I would say my cropping, it changes. It’s always in flux. I never go Dutch. Dutch isn’t for me.
As stern and as still as he is in this image, I do see a bit of tenderness, and it’s specifically with how you’ve layered him with the flower buds in front and also just with the shadow play that’s happening. It almost makes this feel like a memory, almost as if he’s… As real as he is in the frame of this image, he’s sort of floating around the center of it. Do you think any of that plays into this image at all?
I definitely sense a three-dimensional quality the longer I stare at it. That’s another thing that I hope to seek from one of my pictures, but when I’m staring at it, I totally fall back into the memory, and I’m forgetting that, too. Like, you pointing out the flowers, I’ve been looking at him and noticing them, and not once have I commented on them, and I think that’s just because I keep seeing myself looking at him, and it’s very natural for me to find a little bit of a bush or some flowers growing somewhere and see how it can play into the foreground. But he’s very much in the center of a universe. He’s in the center of his own universe, and I think in a very metaphorical way, he’s definitely at the center of a lot of my universe. And where he is the center of a lot of that, it’s actually his absence in the center, which we actually know that to be called a black hole.
So why is he shirtless?
Well, I guess I could say he is way more shirtless than he is with a shirt on. I’ve only met him three times in my adult life, when I was 18 once, when I was 19 once and now when I was 28. He, throughout every one of those meetings, I think one time had a T-shirt on, and it was at night, like when it’s cold. It’s hot. It’s the desert. It’s Riverside. It’s dry. He’s confident in his body. He’s definitely trying to be a man’s man. And in a lot of ways, he absolutely is. But as the biological father to myself, I could reflect a lot of what he is is the opposite of what I wanted to be, and I’m pretty much there. That’s another thing that would come up in my life the last several years, just thinking about how my father, he had a kid, and then he met somebody else and then left my mom. I feel like that stuff happens all the time, like I want to minimize it. I hear the impressions of divorce on kids. But I haven’t met too many people who have not met their dads at all, or have lost their dads.
My brother, however — that’s another interesting detail about us — my brother and I are half brothers; we have different fathers, and he never met his father, never has. He did Ancestry.com something or 23andMe. I forget. And it connected him to a second cousin that brought him to find out who his dad was. To his knowledge, his dad is dead. So my brother actually lives, I would say, a harder truth in having the knowledge in the back of his head that his parents have both passed, [whereas] I was leading with that as something I was afraid to continue experiencing because I was still feeling shortly after my mom passed that I now don’t have parents. In my head I would jokingly call myself Batman. I would think of this goofy YouTube video of this guy parodying Batman screaming, “My parents are dead!” which is very dark, very, very dark. So meeting him was another way of conquering that or smushing that nightmare in a way.
One thing that I always think about with your photos is skin tone, and to some extent, I feel like almost like the word “flesh” is even more accurate than calling it skin tone. You’re always working in very warm, saturated colors, and in this image, the gradient of his tan kind of works as a compositional element of how he’s holding this frame. It may be a super-weird way to phrase this question, but how do you regard flesh in an image?
Speaking on color, I think about flesh looking natural but also having the changing tones that it always has. I feel like from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, we don’t realize how much our skin changes throughout the day — redness, swelling. I don’t know if there’s a constant state of skin tone, but I know we all have different-colored skin tones, from pale to a lot of melanin. I just always want to be able to see the person, for the colors to look vivid. But one thing that bothers me is when you see a lot of different color photographs altogether and skin tones are all over the place. I don’t mean different people. I mean that saturation levels are all wild and, like, different cameras, and some people leaning green, some people leaning magenta. I think skin tones do do that. I do think that can happen, and you can also be in a green scene, photographing around grass. But finding that right shade of red in a skin tone I find to be one of the more challenging things. But I have to also let that go when the sun is doing its funky colors or if I want to try something else. Sometimes I wanna lean cold. Sometimes I want to photograph with incandescents or play with gels. It’s definitely rare. But I try not to let the light failing be a reason for why I don’t take a photo. I would leave without a lot where the light had to be exactly where I wanted it, and now I’m at a point where I’m annoyed that that got in the way of me taking a picture.
You’ve documented your late mother and family quite a bit with photos. How did that series start because I would imagine that’s kind of the seed of where a photo like this kind of came out of?
Absolutely. That began specifically when I saw the Larry Sultan “Pictures from Home” photographs at LACMA. That’s when I was completely at a loss for breath, like I couldn’t breathe leaving that show. I was told that the pictures would leave a big impression on me, like they were so amazing; I have to see them. And it was a retrospective, so they were photographs from his documentary career and then photographs of his parents. My whole life up to seeing those photographs or meeting those pictures for the first time, I always believed that you could, in some way, re-create an image. I think I would look at images a bit differently at that time until I had to kind of conquer this fear I had of photographing my mom.
But what was most impressionable was that he was photographing his parents in their elderly age. That to me, I just knew was not going to happen. Like, “My mom, I don’t know when, but I don’t think she’ll have white hair.” And I don’t know about my father. He seems to be holding his health okay. But I… Well, drug users and all of that, you never know what that’s going to do when you get into your sixties, seventies. And that’s what happened to my mom. My mom was 61.
Seeing those photographs, me losing my breath and having this visceral negative reaction to them, where I thought they were so beautiful, and I feel nauseous, and I can’t describe it… That quote-unquote “can’t describe it,” that’s me going into my head when I was 21, 22 seeing those photos. I was much more closed off at that point, didn’t know how to talk about my family, didn’t know really how to deal with people’s impressions of my mother my whole life. I had some unfortunate interactions with some parents when I was growing up where they would judge my mom or later have to judge me because of my mom. It was all speculation that my mom was using or they just didn’t like that my mom was a recovered addict. Nobody knew exactly what or maybe they did because I’m thinking of a specific friend, his mother, she didn’t want him to come over anymore because she was convinced my mom was using.
Fact is my mom was having some pretty seedy persons at the house, at our apartment. And when I was 16, just to give a quick example, I woke up one morning, and my camera backpack was gone, my Tamrac with my Canon 30D and my brand new Speedlite my brother got me for my birthday and my Macbook or whatever it was then. My brother also got me that because he’s a photographer, and he helped me build my used-equipment package, and then that disappeared.
I just started going down a crazy tangent and a bit of the negative stuff, but it all exploded in some way. Like, if I can picture an explosion, I see an atomic bomb, and I feel like that mushrooming from the atomic bomb was what came after me having these heavy realizations that I feel like for a certain amount of reasons that I could write down on paper, I can’t do this. But I also think that this is the recipe for why I wouldn’t be able to photograph this person, that person being a blank name. And I would often in my head put Barack Obama there, like, “I can’t photograph Barack Obama unless I photograph my mom.” In some way I felt like that was true. It was kind of a way of conquering some anxiety around it, then later became its own entity where I didn’t realize it was the instrument I was using to speak through. We read about that, we talk about that, and we know that about photography, but to experience it on that kind of musician level of like, I’m going out and putting myself into the zone and trying to find the zone, trying to flow, it was a constant wrestle. It still is.
It’s been years of collecting these pictures that mostly have come out of me being in some really bored states of mind, I think, or sad states of mind. Or just simply… Like, I remember speaking to Michael Jang about this: wanting to fish for photos and get your bang for your buck. Something about photographing your family at some point becomes so instinctual. There’s definitely a period probably after I took the first or second very detailed picture of my mother, I felt like I accomplished what I was seeking, just kind of felt satisfied in some way by one or two of those pictures. And then after bringing them into therapy, speaking with my emotional therapist, she would then ask me some pretty on-the-nose, heavy-hitting questions that make me need to put everything on its head. And it was almost so simple. Having to talk about my mom from the beginning or having to talk about my life from the beginning, the why. Why am I taking the photos of my family? I knew in that I was going to sum up my life, and I in no way wanted to minimize that, and it was a huge wound that was leading the whole thing, but, like, also not wanting to be too vulnerable.
I had somebody pity me once, like on the surface to my face, when I was 18. They just said like, “Ah, I feel so bad.” I, at the time, had lived under a staircase at my friend’s house. I called it my Harry Potter room. I loved it. It was fine by me because I was in a nice house. I was having a beach day. This house was also just a block from the beach, invited some friends over, show them my room in the back. They’re like, “Aw, cool!” And then this one girl, she was like, “Wait, are you joking?” “No, I’m not kidding. That’s my room. Isn’t it cool?” Her face just left an impression on me. I can’t give her all that weight because it wasn’t that, but that’s one of those little examples that get thrown into this fishbowl of I don’t want to experience these negative sides of thought that people don’t even realize that they are unloading on you. Like, in that cloud of a sentence, I feel like that’s why I can be more introverted and why a camera is my instrument of choice.
Well, what does a photo let you do then? I get the impression, at least in talking to you, that sitting with the photos is to some extent as important as taking the photos.
Definitely. The more time I can stare at a photograph or a group of photographs, I’m going to hammer in on what’s important to me, what’s lasting about it, what’s timeless about it, and inevitably I’m going to forget a lot of pictures, just like I forget a lot of days and memories. That’s what I’m trying to champion in my own life. I don’t want to forget.
How does this photo of your biological father, how does his presence change or alter how you reflect on the images of your family, just as a series of photos?
Specifically as a series of photos, his presence, it’s the realization of the next chapter moving forward. I try to hold my photographs in their entirety as one archive, and that archive, to me, is a journal. It’s a journal of my eye moving around, my mind moving around, or just simply, I think of it as a scanner of the world, in some way. Some things are worth sharing. Some things aren’t worth sharing — same thing in our thoughts, memories — and sadly, we’re wired to remember more negative thoughts than we do positive ones. I feel like that’s one of the things I’m grateful for photography giving to me, or just pictures in their truest form. The gift of that technology is pretty wild to just have little window transports. That’s how I think about it.
He in it, I still question it in some way. Who is he amongst all these people? There’s more for me to explore, specifically with him as a subject. Walker Evans, I remember reading about his photographs, and it was called “lyrical documentary” where the artist, the photographer is just as much a part of the photograph as the details, the person, whatever the subject is. With these people — it’s not always true, and it’s constantly changing — but often times when I’m looking at the pictures of my family, they’re all these little windows that I feel like I’m vicariously living through, or my nephews can hold the place of photographs that I don’t have of myself because they randomly kind of look like me as a kid. But that’s just by chance. That’s what heavy viewing has brought to light — that just meaning staring at these images for so long. It’s made me realize we all look alike. Some of us look very different, but that’s just like from baby to elderly. It’s given me a nice view of humanity, and I try to keep that global thing in my head.
Since you mentioned that this image kind of represents the next chapter in that series, has the relationship between you and your biological father continued past this photo?
We’ve spoken once or twice since, but no. I haven’t seen him since, and I feel like that’s in part respect on his side, and my end, it’s me still… I’ve been protecting myself, in a way, figuring out what I want from a relationship with him, and also the pandemic has been very in the way of a lot of my plans to continue my family photography. I have plans to see him again soon. Actually the anniversary of what this photo would have been taken on is probably coming up in two weeks, so maybe one year later is enough of a reason to jump out there again.
Do you have an idea of what you want to say with more images that you would make with him?
I feel like I’m hesitant to just generally reflect my anger, and with him in my thoughts, it’s very present. So I’m hesitant to continue down connecting with him and photographing him at this point just because I feel like we haven’t squashed the beef completely, or I haven’t squashed the beef. We spoke about it that day, in a way. It was still touched on in a way where it was like, “Now we can move forward,” which is exactly what my mom used to do. “We don’t have to talk about the past anymore because we’re moving forward.” Hmm, only a few types of people can do that in the world, and I’m not that type of person. I reflect on the past a lot.
You’ve said that part of your interest in documenting your family is to understand the importance of time and build a new narrative. What do you mean by that, and where do you think we can see that in this image specifically?
Narrative control, it’s something that you can’t necessarily have. I feel that I wish I could tell everyone the details of my life and feel like everyone can receive it the same way, but that would mean that everyone would have to be the same type of person, and that’s not necessarily what I’m trying to do with it. For a long time I feel like I couldn’t talk about this stuff, my life in general, everything that made me me. And I still have a lot of questions about it that will never be answered. Or I feel like I can continue doing the detective work, and I want to.
I would for a while try to hide behind pictures or hide behind a fake story, in some way. Even when I was fostered or adopted, it was never official, but my friend’s parents, they took me in when I was 17. So I’ve always had these sort of surrogate people in my life. My brother was a surrogate father. I’ve had surrogate mothers, surrogate parents, surrogate families, but I’ve never known what to be real or true. Photography allows me to kind of break down some of those walls. I feel like it’s given me control over my own narrative, like once I started moving my camera away from what felt like it was important to me to photograph to what I felt like instinctually was more important. Like, photographing my mom on an instinctual level was important to me because I knew that there were no photographs of her. She and I having no complete artifact of our life together was haunting to me. So I needed to, in some way, freeze the time that we had now and try to make up for the time we had then, try to make up for my time that I had then, understand it, fight through some of these nightmares that I was having of memories coming back to the surface, being in the courthouse with my father when my mom was trying to get child support — I can’t even say it. I feel like that’s small in a way, and I’m like, “It’s not that small.” But it’s interesting to try to pull that one out of my brain right now and say it.
I have photographs of my mom in the hospital and photographs of her apartment after she passed when we were clearing it out, and I’ve taken family photos since of my brother and the kids and memories of my chosen family, but I still am figuring out what it is that I’m trying to now do with this new chapter. It was a big thing for me to photograph my mom and to freeze the time with her but now I feel like I’m trying to take that same energy force and go a little bit more inward with it.
I imagine you’ve thought something about this specifically with the photos of your mother, but is a photo enough? And specifically with this photo, do you feel like this photo was enough for you?
No, like very bluntly, no. That was kind of the sad impression I had after my mom had passed, that on the surface I had said no and I sat with that for a long time and just as you asked me that, I felt like I needed to say no because a photograph and the portfolio of them is something I’m grateful for, and they continue to teach me, and I feel like I have a lot of gratitude for that stuff, but I, in some ways, wish I was a videographer. One thing that I was trying to do that I feel like I could have done a better job at was immortalize my mom’s being and essence. That was something I was trying to do through the images, and I feel like after a while I got somewhere with it, and those were the last pictures.
It was not until this photo editor had told me I need to go darker with it and I need to think about removing myself from family and what my perspective might be on these interconnected relationships. I went into her apartment and just kind of did the scientific thing, just going in as a raw documentary photographer, spending some time like a fly on the wall. I’ve done that plenty, done that plenty in the family, but not with a more analytical and aggressive need to document what was around me. In a lot of ways, photography and a photograph, it’s been incredibly important, and it does do a lot for my grief, and I would want anyone who feels somewhat inspired by that process with my family to absolutely take it and run for the hills with it because I want everyone to photograph their family from a loving perspective. I feel like that’s what was missed in my own. But I wish that the photographs no matter what, at the end of it, I’m not going to be with that person, and you’re not hearing them or feeling them. It’s a sort of bump in my letting-go process. My mom was a muse for me. I still had so much I wanted to do with her, so I have to settle for semi-dissatisfaction at this point with them. And that’s why I think I’ve been hesitant to continue forward because I’m still trying to wrestle with what I need to add more into this series for it to feel like it’s… I want a full feeling.
How do you feel like that relates to this image specifically then?
Reflecting on this, this was in addition to my glass filling up. A photograph is not enough. Photographs have the possibility of being enough. August Sander, his collection “People of the Twentieth Century”, going through that, it’s a very spooky documentation of these people, and I feel like I have a hope that having this vast collection of photographs at the end of my life will give me this sense of fullness, right? That’s in comment to an early thing I was inspired by by Linda McCartney’s Life in Photographs. I personally wanna feel more full in my life, and photography and making photographs in a wide way continues to be an instrument for that fullness. So can it be enough? No, but I think the repetition and lengthy analyzation, there’s something more to that.
What do you think we can learn about your biological father from this photo?
I have to pause because, as you asked that question, my dog had farted.
That might stay in the podcast.
What can you learn about my father? He’s not somebody to be messed with, for sure. He intimidated me in my brain for those 10 years leading up to whatever propelled me to push me to take this picture. And that “whatever” is a way of my own mind minimizing my full journey of wrestling with wanting to forget him, and forgetting him for a while, and then remembering him and being haunted by the memories of him, the memories of him not being there, the memories of his gifts arriving on my birthday that my mom would call junk. “It’s all junk.” And that became an early impression in my thought process of what nice things were. My father was sending me school supplies, and I would want the nice mechanical pencils and things like that, and my father would send me the cheapest stuff. He was trying to provide for his family. That’s what I’ve learned now, and I think he is a good family man, a good father to his kids, but I don’t hold myself as a member of that clan, per se. I feel like I was forgotten in his life, and in some way, at this moment, at this very moment, I’m kind of doing the same thing that I would do with mom’s biography, or our biography. I want to not share certain things out of holding back my own shame against myself for feeling certain things. Shame about shame, which was hard to reflect on when I got to that in therapy, knowing that for so much of my life I had shame about my own shame, and I felt ashamed that my family didn’t have money or my father left when I was a kid or my mom told me that they met through their drug addictions. This portrait, it says a lot to me about my own personal resilience, and then it also says a lot about both of our ability to put things down and come back to each other, both on a man-to-man, human-to-human and father-to-son, various different levels. There’s a tenderness.
I mean, when you take a photo of someone, especially if you’re directing how they’re gonna be, there’s a million ways you can have them be presented in the image, and you gave him specific direction of how you wanted him in this. Why is it important that he is presented in the way that he is in this photo?
Through it, I was trying to present myself without verbally knowing that. I know that I was trying to have a conversation about our stuff, and when I talk about it, I’m serious. I go serious. I didn’t have this idea of “I’m gonna go take a serious picture of him,” but I wanted my father to find what I also was doing on a very raw level, and you don’t totally understand that until you’re getting direction from me and in the moment explaining what it is that I’m searching for in a composition, aesthetic and mood type of way. There’s also that discipline and “Nope, we haven’t gotten it. Nope, we gotta do some more. We’ve gotta take some more” — my dissatisfaction. And that dissatisfaction, it leads a lot of what drives me to continue wanting to make certain pictures. Something about this mood, looking back at me, his face, everything about it… I have some photographs of people being serious looking at me, but nothing hits me the way this one hits me. It’s definitely for sentimental reasons, like the seriousness between the two of us. And I think we’re both guilty of being silent on both ends. But I didn’t have his number for years, and I’m a Google search away from finding my phone number somewhere probably. And he doesn’t do any of that stuff. He… I was hesitating to say more about him right there. I pumped the brakes on myself.
I wouldn’t say this unless you mentioned it earlier, but to some extent, because of the power dynamics that happen with photography, this is your way of kicking his ass in the way that you’re able to.
Hm, interesting. I don’t know… I was gonna say I don’t know anyone who could have pointed that out. And I’m like, “Fuck yeah.” But also at the same time, I do it with complete respect and with tenderness toward him. I want for us only to find a closeness in our future. But it was pretty interesting to me once I had the print of him in my hands. I didn’t know until of course I’m looking at my contact sheets and putting the negative into the enlarger. This was all kind of realizing itself to me. Then I’m there with the picture finished on my computer, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, he has no power over this right now, and I wanna share this.” It’s a really nice feeling to kind of lead with the First Amendment, power of free speech, freedom of speech. But I did text him. I did say, “Do you mind if I share this and maybe make you famous?” like as a joke, “maybe make you famous,” but then it’s kind of been my most talked-about photo from the last year, so he’s famous in my own personal little photo-Pat universe.
What have you learned that’s given you the instinct to take this photo specifically?
The composition and mood and where his mood hit, just as you asked that question, my eyes moved over to this picture I have on my fridge. It’s my first job. Not a picture of me at my first job, but it’s a photograph from my first real paid assignment, where I got a proper paycheck from it from photographing Bruce Hornsby, and he was coming out with a new album, and my friend’s father, who was a record producer, called me up on the phone — this was when I was, like, 18 — and he asked me do I know anyone who can photograph in a Diane Arbus aesthetic. “We wanna get all the spookiness of it.” I then sat with it, and I randomly had a portfolio that met that exact description, just because I had been photographing with this square toy camera and trying to wrestle with a messier way of photographing but in a clean process. In a way it kind of sounds like I was trying to make Holga images nice, but the way it all domino-effected, it brought me to taking this one picture of two members of his band, two males, getting married. It’s an older man in a wedding gown and a darker-skin-toned male in a tuxedo. They’re both just looking at the camera exactly as my biological father is.
So I feel like there’s an ingredient in my recipe checklist when I’m taking a photograph that I try to hit this mark of starkness, seriousness, quietness, all in one spot. I’ll jump between real moments and going back to this moment, but that to me just made me remember, oh, yeah, I’ve been taking this type of August Sander–esque portrait, which could also be [Richard] Avedon because these are people I would hold in my heads. My heads. My different caps.
I, early on, was obsessed with the stark portrait. I remember Avedon’s moment with Marilyn Monroe, and she’s looking down, and she looks emotional. The description I read about it was, “She was caught at a moment that nobody had ever seen of her or had ever documented of her.” And that was being the photographer. Maybe not the photographer, but that was, in a way, the type of photographer I wanted to be — the one that could photograph a real, raw moment, but it was still in a way that was in no way trying to be voyeuristic.
Do you think you captured something in your biological father that wouldn’t have been seen before here?
In the pictures that I found of him, that he was sharing with me, and what I imagine exists of him in his own universe, this is pretty consistent with what he shares. It’s him as a “don’t fuck with me” kind of guy and also comfortable with himself. You have to be confident in a certain way to walk around with your shirt off like that. Then again we’re in his backyard.
What did he think of the photo?
He thought it was… He liked it. I know that. I’m trying to think of his wording because I don’t think we spoke on the phone about it. I texted it to him. I texted him the article from Document Journal where the photo editor there he interviewed me, and I spoke about this picture, and my father said, “Pretty deep, man.” In his language back in the day when I was 18, 19, he would call things “badass.” Like, “That’s badass,” in reference to NASCAR and fast cars. So I think he would call this portrait “badass.”
Do you think he knows how much it means to you, or understands how much it means to you?
I think he understands, for sure. On a verbal level, I think I’d have to sit down with him and explain all of this to him, but at the same time, he’s the one man in a house of women, so I feel like he’s been broken in in a way to find his sensitivity that he didn’t have. I say this about the tougher guys in my life when seeing that they become fathers, they soften up. So I feel like at this point, the Craig that I met at 28 is definitely different than the Craig that I met when I was 18. But his journey to understand me as this human being, it’s gonna take… It’s a different cloth, but also the same cloth.
I went to an energy healer recently, and she gave me some notes about, “Maybe you’re holding some ancestral grief related to your father.” I told this to my therapist, and he said “Anyone can say that about anyone.” I said, “That’s true.” I go between states of mind of wanting to like him and bring him up and also wanting to be super real and also stand up for myself and say “Well, this is what you don’t be.” I’m still working through that, still working through conversing about that and forgiving a lot of what’s left behind in my memories.
Interviewed on April 26, 2021.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)
Links:
Pat Martin
The Guardian: “Photographer Pat Martin: ‘Mom was not an easy subject’”
Document Journal: “In Pat Martin’s sun-drenched world, we are never strangers”