Parenting in the beginning is chaotic. Time presents as something elusive. It no longer defines the days. It runs together until a point of clarity emerges. The experience is tiring, but surprisingly nurturing in retrospect. Once the smoke of the early years begins to clear and a sense of autonomy returns, one is left to survive, provide, and eventually help the progeny toward undefined goals, as they perch from the lip of the following, ready to glide. It all happens very quickly in the end. When you are entrenched in the chaos of the beginning, you cannot visualize the changes that will creep up on you. You cannot see the end.

I have been motivated to think of parenthood as slow pain. When I mention this, it is not to suggest that parenting is anything but great. It is. I am lucky to have spent some of my time on this earth being someone’s parent, and I genuinely believe that it is at the core of how I understand the human experience. It’s not easy, just to be clear. By slow pain, I mean it relative to how emotions are set through the experience and how those emotions range from joy to a bizarre type of depression when one acknowledges that the formative years, the closeness, the everyday battles are, in fact, very short. You do your best, and watching your children grow comes with awe, pride, and sadness. Children, like mortgages, remind you of what time you have already used up. This is at the core of the experience. As I have referred to it previously, it is a bittersweet experience, and that experience is how I can frame it, even in the midst of it all.

With Elephant, a recent photobook by Dimitris Mytas through Athens-based publisher Zoetrope, the concept of fatherhood and that of watching one of his children matriculate into the world by leaving for university shares, at its heart, the same palpable feeling of loss and of pride that I have been reaching for. Though the book shares many abstracted images, made into a nearly science fiction realm using inverse negatives, the sentiment shines through in pictures of the artist’s son. Perhaps it is better to see the condition presented through the atmosphere of the book than the direct correlation of the topic suggested, and I can work with that. There is also an air of theater to the work. Specific settings read as stages, and in that understanding, there becomes a familial fourth wall that feels to have been shattered. Family life is not without its theatrical side, no doubt.

What makes me interesting about the work is how the text activates the work. Whereas I would understand some of the motifs discussed through the sequence, it is unlikely that I would have drawn the direct assertion that Mytas suggests without having read his words on the matter. This does not make the concept a failure in visual terms, but it does beg questions of interpretation and how the images that are not of his son encroach on the subject in their relation to his portrait. Do the photos provide more or less context for the text he gives? It’s a complex subject as it is. How do you define these feelings regarding parenting into something concrete? It is virtually impossible to illustrate or convey, yet it activates the discussion when I read the text. One concludes that they are equally essential or weighted so that one cannot be activated without the other.

With this in mind, I do feel the work is relatively unique. I cannot place anything in recent memory that melds the imagery with the topic, though other books about fatherhood and ageing have been documented. There is a specific use of theater and the sci-fi elements that make it hard to place alongside another offering, and for that, I have to admit an infatuation with the book. Zoetrope continues to map the Greek scene and place otherwise unknown projects into physical form at a time when it is difficult to do so. I appreciate their efforts, and this marks another fascinating foray into the Greek photography scene.