Fatherhood is challenging when you’re walking down a path that you’re simultaneously creating.
We are finally seeing a new generation of fathers playing an active, equal role in the raising of children, and understanding the importance of being there for their kids beyond a physical capacity. The modern dad is learning to be more in-tune with their emotion, empathy, patience, their love—all the things a lot of us didn’t receive from our fathers growing up. “My favourite thing about being a Dad,” says Lucky Viegas, “is the feeling of being loved in ways I’ve never experienced before.” Sometimes these omissions were intentional, but often it was simply the byproduct of a previous generation doing what they thought was best.
Even today, the opinion on what true masculinity is is widely divisive. From looksmaxxing to the Mansophere society, being an alpha means ridding all things that are stereotypically seen as ‘soft’ in order to be perceived as strong and masculine. The irony—which is not as lost on me as it is on them—is that their proud homophobia and misogyny predominantly appeals to the male gaze. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence will tell you that real masculinity isn’t whatever the hell they’re doing.
Emotional maturity and empathy allow for patience and understanding: traditionally softer skills that in turn allow you to be your most assured, strongest self. Doing the hard work to check in and take accountability for actions and emotions doesn’t negate masculinity—if anything, it enhances it. There is something so freeing by feeling a kind of way and being able to articulate it. Men of a certain archaic ideology believe that the patriachy lead by emotion, and yet fail to acknowledge that the anger in which they constantly default to, is in fact, an emotion. And if they’re not defaulting to anger, they’re avoiding conversations entirely—Chanté Joseph highlights this in her latest (and depressingly mindblowing) article for Vogue.
Not only does that discovery of self—the understanding of mind as well as body—help nurture relationships with those around you, it fundamentally helps you become the person you want to be. This will (hopefully) help to nurture the relationship with your future children. It wasn’t lost on me that the majority of subjects featured in Louis Theroux’s Manosphere documentary lamented on the lack of having a father figure in their lives.
But enough of the negative.
I’m very quickly entering my fifth year of fatherhood, where my beautiful daughter is about to embark on a new journey of her own: school. My career as a menswear photographer has shaped a lot in my life, but being a Dad is the major thing that helped me reprioritise my time, where I spent it, and who I spent it with.
As my friends in the menswear space started to embark on fatherhood themselves, I ended up having lots of conversations around the topic—such was my wisdom as one of the more well-versed Dads. Note: there is no such thing. Some were of the slightly-panicked variety, but the overwhelming majority were that of excitement: a willingness and desire to learn how to be a good father. It was a wonderful thing every time a new addition joined our ever-growing community.
I wanted to create a little photo series for Father’s Day, specifically around these friends because we rarely get to see their personal sides. We’re friends, of course, but we seldom get time with one another outside of a work or work-adjacent capacity (especially when work often involves play, as it tends to in our industry). This series was a little way to peek behind the curtain, so to speak. Having birthed the concept in mid-May, I quickly realised I was biting off way more than I could chew because organising schedules with Dads—and their children—whilst being a Dad is not for the faint of heart. With Pitti and Fashion month creeping up too, it forced me to pause.
They say patience is a virtue for a reason, though.
By slowing down and removing the deadline I gave myself, it opened up a lot more doors and opportunities to expand the project. Not only have I gone from tentatively shooting five people to now having over twenty-five, I’m hoping to travel beyond the capital (and potentially beyond the UK) in order to truly document this wonderful movement of wonderful Dads.
ReFraming Fatherhood is a project I hope highlights the new wave of good men, being brilliant fathers and partners. I’ll be accompanying these photos with essays on topics that have particular resonance with my experience of being a Dad: time, love, style, grief, hope… you name it. Actually, don’t, I’ve already given myself a truck load of work as it is.
As with most personal projects, there may be some chopping and changing along the way, but I can say for certain it’s already the most fulfilling project I’ve worked on. I can’t wait to share more.
