So we’ve had a general group discussion on what our brief is going to be for this semester. I had a few ideas on my list but mainly ran with the one on my dad who has dementia.
This is still an ongoing thought mainly because I’m just a little unsure of how to present it and what angle to put on the narrative. Do I look at dementia through my dad’s eyes? or from my and my sister’s point of view as his carers?
On the whole dad is amenable and happy in his own little world. We have had brief periods of disagreements but fortunately they haven’t lasted.
The conflict I have is that when I’m ‘in the moment’ of each day of caring duties I am so focussed on the issues of this horrid disease and how it affects us all the last thing I feel like doing is taking photographs!
The sad irony is that dad was always an amateur photographer and even up until the dementia took hold a few years back was Treasurer of the Stoke on Trent Camera Club, having already been the Chairman! He still retains a very simple point and shoot Lumix camera but when I scroll through the images they are mainly of the floor, his lap or the ceiling, and occasionally he captures the Robin on the bird table!
One of the funniest thing dad said to me recently when I took out the Nikon D90 is ‘what are you doing with a camera like that?’ The emphasis being on ‘you’ as though I’m incapable of operating it, or it’s far too an expensive item for me to be in charge of! When I challenged him he just said ‘oh I just wondered that’s all’.
He did call me a few months back in the summer to say he’d seen the funniest thing ever on the way to the shop [he can take the short walk there and back relatively safely]. ‘Oh what was that then dad?’ I enquired, ‘ Well the bus came around the corner and there was a woman driving it’?! ‘Well I’ve never seen that before’ he said. Holding back the laughter I replied ‘Never dad? are you sure? you know they let women do ALL sorts of things now!!’ He was quite bemused by it, and I still laugh about it now.
How do I capture those moments in a photograph? Hmmm… there’s a lot to think about.
On the subject of picking an area to research for this semester…did a little exercise at home to try and narrow down my choices!
I listed the areas of photography I could think about first, I then gave them scores out of 10 for how much I liked them! Then I gave them scores out of 10 for how easily I could access the practice and research of them. Well it narrowed it down a bit, and I may have weighted the scores in my favour a tad! But anyway I do have a smaller list now, but no firm decision … oh dear!