I always wanted to meet my father.The last time I saw him I was three years old. I decided to reflect on this idea using photography. I do not remember what 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 a family with my father.
My mother was always dreaming of an ideal man. When we were watching movies of the 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».
She met my father in Sochi, he was a «resort» man as in a novel, it soon ended up with a marriage. She did not know much about him, only that he was a captain and worked somewhere in Northern Russia. They never lived together. He usually came for a few weeks and then disappeared. At some point my mother found out he had another wife and child. She could never forgive him and they soon divorced.
In her albums there was almost no photo left of my father — not only did she divorced him, but she 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 wears «aviator»sun glasses. He looked like a young Belmondo. On these images they are playing together, kissing each other and they smile a lot. One of these photos I kept for my self (my mother never liked this and was trying to find out why I wanted to have his photo ) since I keep it in my wallet.
Really, why 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 occasions I proudly show this photo to friends («My parents in the 70s»). Even if this photo had never existed, I would have created it with Photoshop.
This project is very personal, somewhere in between documentary and fiction, where the dreams of my mother are real, but the memories I created for myself based on them, are fictional.
Natalya Reznik
Natalya was born in Russia in 1981,she currently lives and works in Germany, studied design at Perm State Technical University, received a PhD in philosophy of culture in Saint- Petersburg State University.She studied photography in several summer photography schools and workshops (including Fotodepartement in Saint-Petersburg and the International Summer School in Slovakia). Worked as a teacher of photography at Perm State Institute of Arts and Culture, Perm, Russia. 2011-currently she is a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany) in history of art (research in the field of theory and history of photography).
