Father & Son, Inc.
I get together with Kristian Pohl at a downtown restaurant. We have a bite to eat, sip on a beer or two. We don’t have anything particular to talk about, so we ramble here and there. He asks me whether I would consider shooting a fantasy press conference with his comrade-in-arms Eirik V. Johnsen for one of their Deadline Art Collective projects.
“You’ve got a deal,” I answer right away, “My privilege. What do you have in mind?”
“Not a thing, actually,” he says. “Maybe we’ll just find a hotel room and try to get into our roles. You’ll have 10 minutes to make some sense out of it all. Perhaps it’s all just a pipe dream, who knows?”
Sounds like a typical job to me. Except I glimpse something different I can’t put my finger on. We move on to a bar, share a few glasses of wine and find ourselves discussing friendship, fraternity, kinship, the fact that you choose your friends but not your family. Parents are an eternal presence. Sensitive middle-aged men always end up talking about their fathers.
And then it dawns on me – I don’t want to shoot Kristian and Eirik, it’s their dads I’m interested in. We celebrate by ordering an entire bottle. The next challenge is to shoot my dad, who died a number of years ago. I miss him more than ever.
We put our heads together again the next day. To our dismay, we’ve come up with approximately 200 concepts for the project. My view is that you should never start off with preconceived ideas. Just let it flow. Eirik is briefed and we decide to include the father characters one way or the other.
Several months later we book a hotel room. Both generations are there. The sons know their parts, but the fathers are completely in the dark. So am I. All I bring is a white backdrop to tape on the wall. I guess I want to hoodwink the “victims” into believing I have some kind of plan. I haven’t been so nervous since I shot actor Ernst Hugo Järegård in 1994. This is about my whole life, about Dad.
Hard to say exactly what is happening in this hotel room. I put myself on autopilot and plunge straight ahead. Kristian and Eirik seem to be in the same frame of mind. All I do is toss them a roll of duct tape, and they take over the show without any direction from me.
Maybe the ultimate lesson is that we are shooting you. And me. And our fathers. Who can say – perhaps our mothers, daughters and neighbours as well. The beggar on the street and the attorney in the luxurious condo down the block. We all have the same dreams, emotions and fears.
We are one species.
Stockholm, 11 November 2016
Johan Bergmark