Playtime

Although my dad did not take photography particularly “seriously” and would never regard his images as constituting, in any sense, an “archive”, the photographs and slides I have been scanning certainly reveal a lot about him and his character.

To someone who didn’t know my dad, his photographs might seem a bit confounding.

My dad was fairly widely travelled, but in his archive there are very few photographs of the tourist landmarks of Spain, France, Italy, Morocco or any of the other places he enjoyed visiting. When I met up with him and my mum on a memorable trip to New York city, I had to insist on photographing him on the Brooklyn Bridge (he was far more interested in the view of Williamsburg bridge, due to its Sonny Rollins associations). Rather than taking pictures of familiar sights, my dad regarded gloves, seats, and inflatable axes as worthier photographic subjects. He shot quiet pictures of patches of sunlight falling across the rooms in which we lived and evocative still-life images of the shredded wheat breakfasts he prepared for my sister and myself . . .

If my dad created a photographic record of the things we made at school, he was just as likely to be interested in the shadow cast by the thing as by the thing itself.

My dad took photographs of clouds and faces in his washing-up . . .

. . and of the interesting shapes cast by a ladle on a cupboard door

In their consistent focus on the wonder and strangeness of the mundane and everyday, my dad’s photographs remind me very much of the work of one of his cinematic heroes, Jacques Tati, whose films – especially Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967) – he completely adored.

Tati’s films are very funny, but they don’t follow the usual conventions of humour in 20th century narrative cinema. Rather, they require a very particular kind of looking. You, the viewer, are assumed to be an active participant in what’s happening on screen . . .

. . . where, if you pay enough attention, you’ll quickly find that there are many marvellous and hilarious things to see.

In Tati’s films, people, objects, and spaces of all kinds bristle with innate creative and comedic potential . . .

. . . and, without ever being remotely didactic about it, his films gently suggest that if you just open your eyes and look more closely at the world, you might well become alive to all the absurd enchantment it contains.

My dad’s photographs were just one of the many ways in which he engaged with the wonder and weirdness of the world around him.

A world in which cowboys, bears and dragons might pass by the front door at any moment . . .

. . . and where scenes of chaotic childhood play are forever arrested in moments of multiple, potential happenings – much like a Tati scene.

. . . and when something does happen in these images, the kids just carry on playing happily while the fire engines and police arrive.

My dad shot five decades-worth of self portraits in bathroom mirrors.

. . . and countless other images in which he is simply represented by his shadow.

Please note the presence of the hat in this last shot: Jacques Tati apparently kept a closet full of hats which might be drawn upon at any point to liven up a dull evening, and for my dad they fulfilled a similar function. For dad, a sneakily concealed and completely inappropriate hat might transform a routine event – such as getting one’s passport photograph taken – into an occasion for happy anarchy. My mum’s appalled shriek of “oh God, he’s got a hat in there” remains a shared familial shorthand for any dad-created or hat-related disruption.

Which reminds me of this. . .

Yes, I am the baby in the booth. Dad’s probably wearing a hat.

My dad’s archive also contains several images in which Helen and myself are game participants in his expressive compositions.

I especially like the following image, in which Helen is evidently tired of holding her arm and interesting head band in exactly the right position to allow dad to take his shadow shot.

I also enjoy the many different ways that dad used his shadow to include himself in family portraits. In the following image, taken on a camspsite in Anglesey, we’ve all been made to stop at the correct moment to allow his elongated evening shadow to appear.

. . .while in this next image, Helen and I have been asked to look down, and to the right, to direct the viewer’s attention to shadow-dad.

There are several other holiday group shots in which my mum – exhausted from her full-time job and hours of family driving – is represented similarly by her extended feet – in a manner that is most definitely Tati-esque.

As you’ll know by now, my dad was a jazz musician, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that in the films of Jacques Tati, jazz plays a crucial role. In Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), for example, the staid torpor of the beachside hotel is loudly disrupted by the jazz Hulot plays on his gramophone, while in Playtime (1967), it is only when a group of jazz musicians arrive that the Royal Garden begins its inevitable descent into energetic, joyful chaos.

My dad lived life – and photographed it – in exactly the same way that he played jazz: freely, expressively, and imaginatively, always with his eyes and ears open for any small chink in the façade of the everyday which might let in some anarchy and joy.

In his excellent study of Jacques Tati’s comedic genius*, Malcom Turvey writes of Playtime’s “utopian moments” in which the action on screen dissolves into “unrestrained, unselfconscious fun” and in a “spirit of spontaneous enjoyment,” everyone loses themselves in the “humorous, ludic possibilities of the environment around them.”

It was in precisely this Tati-esque spirit that my dad lived – and photographed – his life.

Malcolm Turvey, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (2020)