Finbar Flanagan

Venturing into single fatherhood, Finbar Flanagan begins to understand the complexities of becoming the mother for his three children in their rural Irish home while still maintaining the father role. Bonds with many around him have been broken, but his connections with the children have grown to a point of indestructible faith and loyalty in one another. The inclusion of the children as the photographer, creates an equivalence between father and child in the often uncomfortable and melancholic imagery. This duality of the father as mother and the children as mother in her sudden absence has created a whirlwind of emotional turmoil in different forms for both Finbar and his three kids. An emotional roller coaster of unexpected turns and a mental haze that spins the mind as ever new controversies and injuctices threaten the family. They find themselves caught in this tumultuous cycle, as if they were in a tumble dryer.

In this project I used a cheap thermal printing camera that my daughter received as a gift. I wanted the thermal paper to obscure the images, but also to speak about the brittle nature of the situation that me and my children were going through.

The children are never shown completely as a way of showing the viewer my own disconnected relationship with the public as a father. I was afraid on many fronts to reveal my children while they were going through a tough time at home with the separation.