What makes this observation striking is that it’s happening in parallel with his daughter’s emergence into language. While his father loses the ability to name things, they’re just starting to discover it. We’re witnessing three generations and three different relationships with meaning and interpretation, captured in photographs that were never shot with that in mind. “There were images that I felt were interesting the moment I shot them, and others that I didn’t really pick up on until years later,” Jeremy tells It’s Nice That. “It was important to me to select images that retained a feeling of discovery, mystery or uncertainty. There’s an unresolved quality to most of the pictures that I think allows for more interpretation.”
The sequencing unfolds like life itself – sometimes chaotic, other times beautiful, and a lot of the time completely unknown. The narrative was developed with Apartamento’s Nacho and Robbie, who helped draw parallels between the images. For instance, there’s a photograph of Jeremy’s daughter on the beach that appears opposite one of his father shielding his eyes from harsh sunlight. Both images are overwhelmed by light, but the emotional registers couldn’t be more different. In the daughter’s image, “the tone is more confident and confrontational”, says Jeremy, as she’s divided between shadow and brightness, her eyes clenched together. The father “seems more cowed and defensive”. Behind him, a garden is chained off, and a placard reads ‘Portrait’, the name of a rose planted there. “In both cases, the shade is insufficient; on the left, the shadow of the beach umbrella and on the right, my shadow.”
Elsewhere, the book drifts through spaces that hold these lives together – like the living room in the middle of a Christmas present unwrapping or the garden for a game of tennis. We also see the shift from the familiar childhood house to the strange and empty nursing home, while objects like a fallen book or a resting hand mirror one another across the page. They’re small and almost incidental moments, but together they build a visual language of a family.