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A singular tribute to a father

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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.


In the small photo book ‘Days with My Father,’ we learn only a few facts about Edward Toledano -- he was briefly an actor in the 1930s, he married, and, late in life, had a son, Phillip. After Phillip’s mother died, he began spending time with his father, already in his 90s. Phillip took photographs -- beautiful, funny, haunting -- of his dad; he was trying to capture his father’s personality, and to express his love for him. He originally did this on a blog, quietly chronicling those days; the book is a quality production that allows the striking photos and minimal text move in a rhythm developed online.

Phillip soon learned that his mother had shielded his father’s memory loss from him. The opening pages of the book describe his state:

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He doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, but he has no short-term memory, and is often lost.I took him to the funeral, but when we got home, he kept asking me where my mother was. I had to explain over and over again that she died. This was shocking news to him.Why had no one told him?Why hadn’t I taken him to the funeral?Why hadn’t he visited her in the hospital?He had no memory of these events.After a while I realized I couldn’t keep telling him that his wife had died. Constantly re-living her death was destroying us both.So I decided to say that she’d gone to Paris, to care for her sick brother.

It is an act of kindness, of generosity rather than exasperation, and it is echoed over and over again in the book. Toledano looks for the moments of connection and grace, not always serious -- he captures his father’s joking with meringue cookies. Yet his camera is achingly honest: his father’s gnarled fingers, the spareness of his surroundings. This is a book of quiet beauty, filled with sentiment that is true.

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

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