The Brief

1. How does Bryony Campbell’s The Dad Project compare to Country Doctor
2. What do you think she means by ‘an ending without an ending’

In Project 1 I discussed the two photographic essays Country Doctor and The Dad Project [1].  This exercise reviews the differences between them.

Similar But Different

I think the first fundamental difference in the two series’ is how they came about in the first place.  In the case of Country Doctor, we have an assignment for LIFE magazine and although we cannot be sure how the subject was chosen or how much of it was Smith’s natural observation, there is an element of editorial motive in the series.  The story being told is a remote perspective of life in a rural community and the hard work of the local physician.  The documentary style of the story is clearly aimed at informing an audience that is not all that familiar with the subject with a feel-good element of knowing that such heroic people exist in the country.  The audience then is perhaps akin to a collection of movie-goers who bring to it little or no predetermined knowledge of the story before it is told.  The series is powerful and it is shot as if a window on the doctor’s working life, but Smith put himself in the environment to such an extent that he was a silent participant in the events that make up the story.  It is clear from the photographs that he would have reacted to the situations both as the photographer and as the audience.  From a narrative perspective, Smith builds complex layers in the sequence by including elements that are obvious to the viewer and those that need more thought.  In the shots where the doctor is not the central focal point of the composition, the viewer has to reach their own conclusion as to what is going on, e.g. the doctor treating the little girl’s broken arm [1].

In Campbell’s essay, we have a much more intimate story being told.  This time, Campbell includes herself in the story, both as daughter and photographer.  The story is about her saying goodbye to her dad, which meant that she had to capture the relationship as if she wasn’t the photographer.  This ‘insider’ perspective is the first difference between the two stories.  The second is that her father actively participated in the story.  Some of the shots in the series had his direct engagement, something that wasn’t present at any time in Smith’s work.  The accompanying video to the series further emphasises this point and perhaps a very obvious difference in the use of mixed media.  Technology allowed Campbell’s father to describe what the project would mean to him in a contextual way that was not available to Smith in 1948.   Campbell’s use of subjects other than her father is similar to Smith’s in making the viewer look for the meaning rather than being signposted to it. She also uses compositions of seemingly unconnected subjects, such as the spilled milkshake alongside more obvious imagery.  In the case of the milkshake, Campbell’s father had dropped it on the floor in a minor accident caused by his declining strength.  Alone the shot doesn’t tell us much, but woven into the sequence, it gently points us to the shift in what is normal.  Campbell describes the series as gentle and quiet, which comes through strongly as the the story progresses.  Contrasting with Smith’s often dramatic images of surgery and the doctor’s exhausting work, Campbell’s work doesn’t set out to make us feel a particular way.  Instead it relies on the viewer knowing enough about the pain of losing someone to cancer as a backdrop.  With the current pressures of daily life with COVID-19 and my own personal experience of losing my mother to cancer, I procrastinated about completing this research work and writing because it was just too hard.  While Smith’s work won acclaim for its clever storytelling, Campbell’s has been praised for offering comfort to people who are experiencing similar losses.

An Ending without an Ending

The second part of this exercise asks about the statement made by Campbell in The Dad Project.  My thoughts on what she meant by this centre around the way that the narrative doesn’t end with the photographs themselves.  This series walks the viewer through the final months of her Dad’s life from the perspective of him fading away, but also the struggle of his family to adapt to the dynamic nature of his decline.  Campbell states that it was a way of saying goodbye to him with the help of her camera, but his death in many ways was the start of the project.  What I mean by this is in the same way that a death begins the process of mourning, it is also in this case the beginning of the response to the work.  In her appraisal of the project Campbell writes as a retrospective some 3 months after his death.  The ending without an ending for me is the ongoing story of Campbell coming to terms with her loss through reflecting on both the work and the way people respond to it.  As Campbell states in her writing, the effect of the project of spreading her grief out means that it takes on different meaning with the passing of time.  In the short term, the story would be raw and painful but with the gathering interest in the work it would become more of a celebration of her father. She writes that she wishes he could read the letters she had received in response to the project’s publication, because it would have given him a sense of pride.

When compared to Country Doctor, which documented a slice of the life of someone fairly anonymous to the photographer, The Dad Project is clearly acting as a catharsis for Campbell many years after it notionally ended.

References

[1] Fletcher, R, 2020, “Project 1: Telling a Story”, C&N Blog Post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2020/05/29/project-1-telling-a-story/