Valery Poshtarov has been travelling all over Europe asking fathers and sons to do one thing: hold hands. The Bulgarian photographer sits down with News Editor John O’Connor and tells us his incredible journey - a project that is both innovative and personal.
When was the last time you held your father’s hand? The first time you may not remember, most likely through the open hand port of the incubator in the hospital where you were born - your tiny fist wrapped around your father’s finger. We can imagine the first, a shared experience that we can see in our mind’s eye and our curated collective memory. This path from the incubator to adulthood and that familial line between the first and last time a father and child may embrace one another is tumultuous and inconclusive despite its heavily trodden nature.
So I ask again: when was the last time you held your father’s hand? Was he guiding you across the road, steadying you as traffic passed? Was he showing you how to saw a piece of wood, clamped tight in the mouth of a vice, a firm hand over yours, guiding you? Although attempting to remember such an act is an uneasy affair at best, rather like looking through a stained looking glass, one eye closed, and not truly wanting to locate the result, it seems to me now that the question is necessary and the answer is telling. It is a kind of ritual, the question, to remember what we have, what was lost, or when it may have gone away. In order to remember it, one must have known it. However, there was indeed a last time, as there had to be a first. That is the nature of such things, it is easy to imagine the beginning of them, and harder to see their ends.
A similar thought entered Bulgarian photographer Valery Poshtarov’s mind while he was walking his two sons to school, he found himself thinking, although he held their hands daily, one day they would no longer need him alongside them - losing that sense of physical closeness he had grown accustomed to. Mr. Poshatrov decided he wanted to photograph his own father and grandfather holdings hands, telling The University Observer that this project of photographing fathers and sons across Europe ‘started as a personal endeavour, for my understanding that we as men, we can stay close even when we are grown up. I really wanted to make a portrait of my father and grandfather, but then what this project became is more about the cultural heritage than the mere father son relationship. Just by expanding the project to different countries, this led to this broader perspective that I became even more interested in, [...] a cultural entropology visualised - with many different layers.’
Since the project’s conception, Mr. Poshtarov has travelled all over Europe; Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, Armenia, around the Western Balkans, and beyond. In Ireland, men holding hands, specifically fathers and sons, challenges the heteromasculine - but it would be counterproductive to paint every home, county, and country with the same narrow brush.
In Ireland, men holding hands, specifically fathers and sons, challenges the heteromasculine but it would be counterproductive to sweep every home, county, and country over with the same narrow brush.
When speaking of how fathers and sons from different countries have reacted when introduced to the idea of the project or when they do indeed hold hands, Mr. Poshtarov said that ‘we all have some kind of stereotypes and expectations [about masculinity and holding hands], but seeing this on terrain was very revealing for me and I was really intrigued to find many different perspectives. [Mixed reactions] is predictable, even for participants. That is the pure joy of working on this kind of participatory project, because you never know how it will land. I'm not taking pictures of something ordinary, these encounters in this particular act of holding hands is not something common [for many people] And in this provocation, I see this spontaneity, which is also very important, because we the participants are put into a situation where they can't really act it and I'm also trying not to intervene too much. So it's revealing, I love this particular spectacle that brings an authentic spirit to it.’
Mr. Poshtarov intentionally provides no further information alongside these photographic observations apart from an index of countries where the photographs were taken. A blank page, devoid of geography, accompanied by an image of two men with decades of countless arguments, moments of joy or potential loss, missed points and misunderstandings, all hidden in a frame and beneath interwoven fingers - ‘I don't want to put generalizations [on the subjects] and I leave the interpretation to the public. I intentionally mixed all the photographs, fathers and sons from different countries and from chapter by chapter, leaving this room for people to guess the country and culture behind it. I believe that this is something that is conceived more as a dialogue, a dialogue between fathers and sons from different cultures. I want to just erase this gap in some way. I believe the less we know about the photograph, the closer we get to the story, which is a paradox in itself. I believe very much in this freedom.’
Photography is often where art and the commercial merge to such an extreme degree that one cannot recognise the other and a sense of competition springs from those who want to succeed in both. Somewhere in between the black and white, between art and business, is a grey area where the arts still has the ability to invoke what is arguably the most important result: thought. Mr. Poshtarov still believes, ‘very much in the arts, in general, not in photography in particular, but in the importance that we are taking part in a dialogue. Each of us is bringing something unique, and it's not a competition. In this art world, we are often made to believe that we are competing, but I don't believe in this. Every one of us has their own voice and contribution - this is why it's so beautiful to hold hands, in many different ways we can find to bring this dialogue into something fruitful, something that will give more value to humanity.’
I ask again: When did you last hold your father’s hand? If a fully formed answer has yet to appear in the mind, then perhaps it is time, if you are able, to change your answer - to today.
Every one of us has their own voice and contribution - this is why it's so beautiful to hold hands, in many different ways we can find to bring this dialogue into something fruitful, something that will give more value to humanity.