Father, David Jackson

This is not my house

Filmmaker and photographer David Jackson recently photographed and made a film about his father before he moved from his home in Malta back to England. This is David Jackson’s account of This is not my House: On making a film with my father.

During a recent argument my wife tells me in no uncertain terms: ‘You’ve become your father, you know that, don’t you? You eat like him, walk like him, breathe like him.” She shoots me a look. “You are him.” She’s told me this before and, once again, I shrug off the comment. I really don’t want to hear this over dinner. She knows me well enough to strike a well-aimed emotional blow. She also knows my father is the person I most don’t want to be like: with all due respect he’s who he is and I am who I am (or so I like to imagine). She walks away, leaving me to finish dinner alone.

Afterwards, I go back to work editing my film to accompany a forthcoming exhibition of photographs about my father and his house in Malta. I stare at the computer screen a long while. My wife’s words are still ringing in my ears. The image on the screen is my father sitting at his table at night alone, watching football. As I sit alone in the dark looking at an image of him sitting alone it strikes me there may indeed be a parallel between us. Is there some truth to what she’s saying?

Father & son, David Jackson

As father and son, are there hidden emotional and physical fault lines between us, impervious to my indifference? It seems this question underlies my film. Whilst I may not physically resemble him (I look more like my mother than my father), I have come over time to eat, walk and breathe in his image. How can this happen, I ask? How did I become my own father? What forces – psychological or otherwise – shape us in the image of our own families? After all, I’ve done my best to edit myself out of the picture, tried to push it in a different direction. Tellingly, I appear only once in the film, to disagree with my father about an image through the viewfinder. My wife says the scene is further evidence of my emotional cruelty. I don’t see it that way. Of course.

My desire to make the film was sparked by the news my British father had sold his house in Malta to return to England after 24 years away. I started photographing him five years ago, just after my Maltese mother died. What affected me most after her death was the realisation I would never hear her voice again. I had photographs but no recordings of her. All gone. As a filmmaker I felt an obligation not to let the same thing happen with my father. So when he sent me an email to say he was leaving Malta I knew this visit to his house would be my last. That too would all be gone in a few months. He had sold the house and all the contents as one big lot. He had put aside five boxes of personal possessions and that was all he was shipping back.

I suppose I’ve always been a reluctant son. I left home for university at 18 and never went back. Until now. I’m beginning to realise that my film and photographs with my dad are my way of returning something to him. But the gift of a film is no gift at all to a reluctant 74-year-old. Framing him as an image in my camera is not a straightforward matter. It’s an emotionally complicated and draining experience – for both of us. All the images I wanted I found within striking distance of his house.

My film and photographs serve as a kind of emotional inventory of my father and his house of 24 years at 134 Carlo Manche Street, Gzira, Malta. My project may ostensibly be about my father but I’ve come to realise it’s also about me because I am there, looking at him, at all times.

So what compelled me to lug a heavy camera kit 3,000 miles to photograph him? On reflection, I know only this: This Is Not My House is a work of love. There were moments when I would look through the camera and just have to stop, simply stunned: this is my father. I am astonished that a photograph or fragment of film is still able to capture the single point of any moment and make it an exception. Everything follows from that.

David Jackson and William Lakin are exhibiting photographs and film documenting their respective families. William Lakin follows the life of his English and Mexican grandparents. 

New Work from Mexico and Malta: family in spite of… is part of PhotoHastings 2014.  Rothermere House (enter in Claremont, opp Dyke & Dean), 49-51 Cambridge Road, TN34 1DT. Open October 1-12 and 17-19, 11am-4pm.

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