EOIN Carey spent his 30th birthday on a labour ward with his life turned “upside down” by the birth of his daughter.
“It was like being struck by lightning,” he said. “In one instant I was undone. Parenthood was totally unexpected for me, an unprecedented life earthquake that turned my life around and – I felt – upside down.”
Like many other new dads, he fell in love with his child but found that even though fathers now share the care much more than before, their experience is still largely portrayed in stereotypes.
“I feel that stereotypes of fathers remain, as either heroes, incompetent or simply absent,” said single dad Carey. “This doesn’t reflect the reality for many.”
One stereotype that does prevail for fathers and men in general is silence, he believes.
“In my experience and for other fathers I met, early parenthood can be very lonely,” said Carey. “Fatherhood in our culture can be one without transition, traditions or a sense of community.”
A photographer by profession, he was so wrapped up in the chaos of early parenthood he was unable to record the stresses and moments of joy during that intense time.
Witnessing so many fleeting moments of chaos and beauty but without a free hand to document them, Carey wished that another set of eyes could have captured his experience.
It made him realise how much of parenthood goes undocumented apart from the smiles and the selfies, and how valuable it would be for fathers and families to have a record of the ordinary, routine and precious moments of parenthood that get forgotten as the stages change and time moves quickly forward.
He points out that while there are possibly more pictures taken of children by their proud parents than ever before, they are very curated and for most new parents the nuance of those exhausting times passes by unrecorded and often without themselves in the pictures.
With life in more of an even keel, he decided to record for others what he couldn’t record for himself and through photographs has documented the experience of other dads in order to express the complexity, importance and emotion of parenting for men.
“Caring for a child is literally that, and the care that must be given as a parent brings us in touch with a gentle, softer, more loving side of ourselves that men don’t get opportunities to experience regularly, and may not have experienced before meeting a child,” said Carey.
“It is real and crucial and I want my images to show this sensitivity back to fathers and society at large – to see the importance and validity in children’s lives of a father.”
Inspired by his own experience of early parenthood as a single dad, his new book Father was created over two years with participants drawn from Glasgow.
It documents unstaged, candid moments of dads with their children at different stages, from newborns to older children.
Carey said: “I believe that parenting is a challenging transition in life that brings people into contact with their most caring and tender selves and I wanted to capture that essence to make a body of work that reflects on masculinity in modern society.
“Motherhood is a concept that I feel is more nuanced and much more developed artistically so I wanted to explore the transition that fathers, and secondary carers, pass through in becoming a parent that is somewhat intangible because it does not have the physicality of childbirth.
"It is an intimate, intense and beautiful time in a person’s life and I want to show the tenderness and stress, play and poetry of parenthood.”
He added: “In many ways, the telling of these stories is a way of starting to tell my own.”
The book is a limited edition publication designed by Eoin and designer Jack Shaw, another father who participated in the project, and there will be a launch event on Father’s Day, June 18, at The Glad Cafe in Glasgow to coincide with the publication of the new book.
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