Son Of A Father, Father Of A Son is the first instalment of a visual series
which aims to portray familial relationships and the soft microcosms from
which they develop.
Femi Dada, more often known as “Rasta,” farms with his two sons, Seun and Segun. Rasta
learnt how to farm from his father, now he uses his hands to support his sons through
school while training them in his vocation. Individualism is a virtue Rasta holds close to his
heart, “My gift to them is freedom. After school, they can choose anything they want to
be.”
We tend to invest our time, energy and resources into the people we love, with nothing
expected in return but reciprocated love and respect. Father-son relationships are
frequently characterized by friction evolving from chasms of communication, but this one
dynamic is a close-ended case on an infinitely diverse spectrum.
We continually thought about capturing images which would empathetically reflect the
emotionality involved in a loving father-son relationship, using Rasta and his sons as
subjects. We sought to photograph them where they spend most time together, on the
farm, garbing them in sustainable brands, Bloke, Dukun, and Kkerele.
We chose sustainable brands because the ideas of slow, steady, and necessary, also ring
true in sustaining lifelong familial relationships.
The encompassing vision of this project is to pose the question, “What makes Father-son
relationships falter or flourish?”