Photographing my Pa was gold

It started as a high school art project. I gave myself the task of photographing my grandfather for a school assignment because still-life art photography bored me senseless.

He was a survivor of prisoner of war camps in the south of Japan during WWII, imprisoned for more than three and a half years and forced into slave labour at the Kawanami Shipyards (now Mitsubishi Heavy Industries), and later at a mine further north. Not long after the destruction of Nagasaki, an event that reached temperatures of more than 1,000,000°C, he walked through the lifeless rubble. But on this day, flash forward to 1997, he was just sitting in his dining chair after dinner, wearing his well loved but super gross puffer jacket and patiently waiting for me to honour my scholastic task.

Pa was a Dutch Indies man born in 1917. He had his mother’s delicate Asian features, smooth skin and chiseled contours, combined with his father’s big block headed Dutch crown.

Nanna, my grandmother, his wife, who had been a real looker in her day, would often defend her choice of husband as a man who was “interesting rather than beautiful”.“You always get sick of good looks,” she’d say.

It was just as well he was interesting, because for this photoshoot I was far more interested in his stories than his appearance. Stories about the war, life as a POW, witnessing the Nagasaki atomic bomb and growing up in Java.

I set up my old Soviet era Zenit camera with its fast lens, probably an f1.4, framed him up and took a few shots. But for a man who for a time lived near the atomic bomb hypercentre and precipice of the end of the Second World War, and with such interesting facial features, I was getting nothing from him. No expression. No spark. No visual story.

I changed camera angles. I asked him to shift his eyeline. Nothing worked.

Finally I said, “Pa, you have to do something in the photo.”

I paused and thought. “What if you thought about something?”

He stared upward for a moment. Lord knows what he was thinking about when Nanna suddenly called out from the kitchen,“Do a sum in your head. What’s the square root of seven?”

Pa looked down, concentrating fiercely, like a contestant on a quiz show as the buzzer ticked down. Years of teachers college did not help him now. He clutched at the near impossible sum until, as if the imaginary buzzer sounded, he looked up and said,“I don’t know.”

The absurdity of it made him burst out laughing, chuckling like a cheeky schoolboy. As he settled, nuzzling his left cheek into his mottled, weathered palm, still smiling, he looked back at me, his gaze refracting through the Zenit camera’s lens and straight to my soul, as if to say, “Give me a break.”

Click.

That one hundred and twenty fifth of a second would later appear on his eulogy booklet and hang in the homes of his children and grandchildren.

The photograph also went on to be shown in art exhibitions and later appeared in his posthumous book Indo, beautifully compiled and crafted by my aunt, his youngest daughter Jacquie.

Since then, I’ve always made sure that the people I photograph have something to think about when the shutter goes click. It doesn’t need to be deep, poignant or groundbreaking, just something that is true to them. A memory they had, something funny they read, or even the fact they hate having their photo taken, which is most people and I get it.

It’s gold, as long as the thought they’re having is real to them.

It’s all gold.

I took this photograph sometime in 1997 and printed it on Ilford photo paper. It took ages to get the print right in the darkroom because the old Zenit camera’s shutter blind was faulty and overexposed the top half of the frame.