The mothers I might have had

When Caroline Furneaux’s father Colin died suddenly in 2011, she discovered an archive of 35mm slides that he had shot during the 1960s. They were a beguiling series of beautiful women photographed in idyllic locations, mostly in Sweden, where he was working and living. It was during this time that he had first met Caroline's Swedish mother, Barbro, yet hardly any of the photographs were of her.

Who were these girlfriends? For Furneaux, they evoked off-duty film stars from a bygone era. They were everyday goddesses encapsulating the essence of youth and Scandinavian summers: short and intensely sweet.

Sleuth-like, she scoured the photographs, cropping and enlarging tiny fragments, looking for clues as to who the women might be and how her father might have met them. She showed them to family members, but they didn’t recognise any of them.

She began writing her own responses to these images, creating characters and entwining them with memories from her own childhood and summers spent in Sweden. As the work progressed, Furneaux realised that what she wasreally trying to unlock was the identity of this young man, and the complex father he would become. By some miracle of light and time, these magnificent strangers had connected her with this insouciant version of her father, and given their relationship a new life.

Caroline Furneaux is a photographer and writer based in London. Furneaux is interested in the interplay between words and images and the symbiotic relationship between photography and literature. On its way to becoming a book, images from The Mothers I Might have Had have been shown at FORMAT International Photography Festival and featured in the RPS Journal of Contemporary Photography. This is Furneaux’s first book.

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