1983 | Del Mar, California
My daughter enjoyed our many photo-sorties together, and she came to develop a fine and sensitive eye of her own, bringing back pictures all the way from India and all through the long continent spanning Panamá to Tierra del Fuego.
Before her photography took hold, Emily found her own inspirations when my camera was along. At Quail Gardens, I liked to work up the dense tropical sections. After I had set up each view, she would take my focusing cloth for a wizard’s cape and make magic in the deepest and darkest corners of the place.
This picture was made later that same day in Del Mar, a few months before my son arrived to join us in the world. By the calendar, it’s not a Father’s Day picture, but it works like one as I look back thirty-seven years to its irrefutable evidence – my daughter and I were working differently with the same material, but we found our own access to a shared message through separate windows.