PHOTOGRAPHY | Always better on the outside

Images from Mr Toledano's series entitled 'Days with my father'. It's a beautiful series: touching, sometimes saddening, sometimes humourous. It is a journal of three years spent with his father after his mother's death. The photographs themselves are completely beautiful, showing moments of the vunerability, humour, confusion, sadness and intimacy. I'd reccommend viewing the whole collection here, and reading the words that accompany them.

My Mum died suddenly on September 4th, 2006. After she died, I realized how much she’d been shielding me from my father’s mental state. He didn’t have alzheimers, but he had no short-term memory, and was often lost.

I took him to the funeral, but when we got home, he’d keep asking me every 15 minutes where my mother was. I had to explain over and over again, that she had 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. He didn’t remember, and it was killing both of us, to constantly re-live her death.
I decided to tell him she’d gone to Paris, to take care of her brother, who was sick.