What was your initial reaction when you discovered the slides in your father's collection, and how did it inspire the concept for this book? How did you approach and interpret these photographs?

I first discovered my father’s archive of 35 mm slides a few years after his sudden death in 2011. My parents had lived in the same house for fifty years and the slides were stored in a cardboard box in the spare room, along with the rest of life’s remnants. I knew my father had been a keen amateur photographer in his youth, so expected slides from his National Service days in Nigeria, or of pea growing in Southern Sweden where he had worked as an agronomist. 

The first slide that I put into my father’s Solar Colour Viewer was of this beautiful young woman, wearing a red hairband and blue raincoat, framed by cactuses. She had the most incredible smile, and she was looking straight at me. At the same time, she was looking straight at my dad, and he was looking at her. It was spine-tingling. As I discovered more and more slides of glamorous women, it felt wonderful to discover this part of his life, and this version of him, that I had no idea existed.  In my lifetime, particularly as a teenager and adult, he could be difficult and cantankerous, so it made me incredibly happy to see him having so much fun.

A Photax Solar Colour Viewer
Source: Caroline Furneaux

The title The Mothers I Might Have Had came to me very quickly. Looking at all these fabulous women and wondering about the paths not taken. Thinking about how easily things might have turned out differently, the precarity of our own existence. To begin with I was most intrigued by the identity of the women. Who were they? Would they still be alive? How had their lives turned out? However, after inquiring within the family, and coming up with no obvious leads, I realized that tracking them down would be a more serious undertaking and become a very different kind of project. The more time I spent with it, the more I understood that the project was in fact about my father - trying to discover who this young man had been - and our relationship, which felt unresolved given his sudden and unexpected death. It felt like we were undertaking a new journey together. When it came to creating the book, ostensibly a photo book, I wanted the words to be as important as the images, for them to carry equal weight. The photographs were clearly striking, but I knew they were not enough on their own, they would need to work in tandem with the words to carry the story and idea. I was inspired by artists and writers who have incorporated images in their work, either as reproductions or descriptions, for example Sophie Calle, W.G. Sebald, Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux and Leanne Shapton. I saw this as an exciting opportunity to create a book that hovered somewhere between the photo book and literature.

When you decided to publish your findings in a book format, what was the initial narrative you wanted to build? How did you decide which details to preserve as mysteries and which to explore further?

From the beginning I knew I wanted to build a narrative in the style of a mystery story in which the reader would have to play the role of detective, just as I had done. By alternating between the enlarged fragments of my father’s photographs and his original images, the reader has to decipher the drip feed of clues, actively flipping the pages backwards and forwards in order to make sense of them. 

The words are deliberately sparse in the beginning, gradually building up over the course of the book as more and more information is disclosed. The enlarging of tiny fragments, Antonioni-style, adds to the feel of an investigation and reflects the obsessive act of looking and re-looking at these images from the past, desperate for answers that the flat surface of the photographs will never be able to satisfy. The fragmentary images and words mirror the fragmentary nature of memory and of the knowledge we have of our parents. It is not until halfway through the book that the identity of my father is revealed.

Judy

The details that I choose to draw attention to are of course personal to me and some will be more obvious to readers than others. I began by grouping the fragments into simple categories, like cars, red nails, stomachs being sucked in. At the same time I was trying to work out the chronology of events as only a couple of the boxes were labelled.  Most of the women appear only once but there are a few who appear several times which helped me to work out which ones seemed to be serious girlfriends or just friends. There were other clues I was interested in, like the woman on the phone wearing a ring on her wedding finger or the second girl in the boat wearing a white bow in her hair – on first viewing you could easily miss her. Then there are others which the reader will not be able to guess, which are more personal ‘madeleine’ moments, for example Pia’s pale blue eyeshadow and blue mascara, both of which I used to wear as a teenager in the 1980s or the slippers which I recognize as my father’s that he used to wear when I was a child (which were abandoned long ago). The Sibelius Symphony No. 2 record, was also a feature of my childhood, and my mother has this very same record in her collection today. In the same photo, there is a small white bedside table which my mother still has in her guest room, and on which my husband and I put our books and trinkets when we stay. There is something incredibly powerful and moving about these objects that outlive us and have made it from the unknowable past into the present day. 

How do you think these photographs reflect the politics, the culture and spirit of the time, particularly in Sweden?

These photographs are clearly a product of their time, that is a 1960s Western European male gaze. However, I think it is striking just how strong, confident and relaxed the women appear, in some cases boldly returning the photographer’s gaze.  This certainly seems to reflect the zeitgeist of the era, with second wave feminism and newfound female independence and sexual freedom on account of the pill. Ingmar Bergman’s films were a key point of reference, in fact I named one of the women ‘Harriet’ after the actress Harriet Andersson who plays Monika in the 1953 film ‘Summer with Monika’ (Sommaren med Monika). This film (along with another 1950s Swedish film ‘One Summer of Happiness’ (Hon dansade en sommar) by Arne Mattsson) was groundbreaking in its depiction of non-marital teenage sex and nudity, but also in its exploration of the female desire to break free from the domestic shackles of being a wife and mother. It undoubtedly contributed to the myth of ‘Swedish Sin’ coined by Time Magazine in 1955 following the introduction of mandatory sex education in Swedish schools - the first country in the world to do so. A decade later, when the sexual revolution had spread across America and parts of Western Europe, Sweden was perceived as the guiding light!

What role does nostalgia play in your work, and how do you balance its allure with the realities of the time the images were taken?

I think there is a feeling of nostalgia inherent in the colour quality of the Kodachrome slides which is extremely seductive and evokes the mythic qualities of the 1960s. However nostalgia frequently denotes a yearning for a romanticised past, whereas my memories of my relationship with my father are not all positive ones. Of course there is an element of nostalgia in my own recollections of childhood, reflected in the dream-like quality of the narration.  But ultimately these are not my photographs, and it is not my time, so I am not looking at the images themselves through a nostalgic lens. The project is about reframing and reinterpreting my father’s gaze through a contemporary female lens. Almost at the centre point of the book I have deliberately positioned a double page, full bleed, close-up of a woman’s face. She has short, cropped hair and is wearing a light blue crew neck t-shirt. She looks very cool and wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary issue of Dazed & Confused. She is staring directly at the camera, fiercely returning the photographer’s gaze. I love this photograph. I am not an object, she seems to be saying, don’t you dare pin me on your bedroom wall. 

What was the significance of naming and fictionalizing the women in the images? How did this shape the narrative of the book?

To me these magnificent women looked like off duty movie stars from a bygone era. It was exciting to imagine my father living this glamourous lifestyle (far removed from the cheese sandwiches that he used to eat for his packed lunch every day). I used a combination of names of movie stars from the era, like Britt (Ekland), Bibi (Andersson), Liv (Ullman), as well as names from the love letters that I found in my father’s wardrobe like Patricia, Judy and Sue. Two of the names are of course real, that of my mother, Barbro, and my father, Colin. I like this blending of fact with fiction which occurs throughout. The facts give the work authenticity, while the fiction reminds us that everything is interpretation.

The purpose of giving the women names helps to build a detective story, to draw the reader in. I think we react differently to an image of a person when they are named, we automatically believe they are real and invest in them more than we would with an anonymous photo. I also think it is interesting to play with the idea of unreliable evidence, and question how much we can ever know the ‘truth’ about people or situations. It is easy to make people up - we do it all the time. The women depicted are real, but only in as much as they are photographs of real people who have existed. The rest is imagination. My father would no doubt have had a very different take on these same photographs, as of course would the women themselves. Similarly, what I see in them as the middle-aged daughter looking at my late father’s pictures, will be very different from what the stranger looking at them for the first time will see. We are constructing fictions of the past, present and future all the time.

If someone recognises themselves or a relative in the photographs, what impact do you think that might have on the narrative and meaning of the book you’ve created? 

I have thought about this possibility a great deal! Sweden has a relatively small population and so it is not out of the question that someone will recognize themselves or their mother or grandmother. Although the thought makes me slightly nervous, I feel that my presentation of the women has been respectful, so I hope that they would be amused by the project, rather than offended by it. I think it would be extraordinary to meet one of these incredible women that I have spent so much time looking at. I would love to find out how their lives turned out and to hear their stories. It would be fascinating to gain further insights into my father and the time they spent together. I am not sure that it would change the meaning of the book, given the story is about me looking at my relationship with my father, but I suppose it might alter the narrative of those years between the death of his mother and the finding of his wife, that the archive represents.  In a sense I see these women as representing his search for his lost mother - the mothers he might have had. It would be interesting to get their take on that - perhaps it would lead to a sequel!