‘Who are you?’ An artist confronts photos of her father’s past lovers

(CNN) — Do we ever really truly know our parents? As children, it’s often hard to imagine that they had full and complicated lives before us. Even as we get older some parts remain shrouded in mystery, their early romances and other unfollowed paths mere footnotes.

London-based photographer Caroline Furneaux was confronted with these questions after sifting through boxes of her father’s 35mm slides in the years following his sudden death in his 70s. She’d had a complex relationship with him, and felt as if his death in 2011 left things unresolved, she explained in a phone call. She let the archive sit for some time, expecting a familiar array of pictures taken during his compulsory national service, or perhaps his documentation of crop growth while working as an agronomist in Sweden.

Instead, peering into her father’s handheld slide viewer, she found sun-kissed women she’d never seen, sitting in convertibles, posing on rocks at the beach or gathering wildflowers by the sea. Taken in the 1960s before he married, many in Sweden, the portraits may have been a series of girlfriends, flings or strangers.

Conspicuously absent was Furneaux’s mother, save for two images shortly after they met.

“Who are you? And you? And you?” she recalled thinking as she loaded each slide.

Confronted with their coy smiles, magnified and vibrant through the small viewer, Furneaux felt as if she were present for a part of her father’s life she never thought existed. And a version of him, too, that felt new and unfamiliar.

“When I saw these pictures, I suddenly had this glimpse of his life — his previous life — and a version of him that I did not know. It was wonderful,” she explained.

“My complicated, difficult, frustrating dad… and then here was this carefree young guy seeming to have the time of his life,” she added.

Now, years later, Furneaux has published the images as a book, titled “The Mothers I Might Have Had,” picturing the imagined maternal figures who could have rerouted her life. It’s a posthumous collaboration of sorts, weaving in Furneaux’s own memories of him in accompanying text. She gives each woman a name (some found in a stash of letters; others entirely fictionalized), and crops into details of their portraits, presenting them like half-remembered moments: in one, the crook of an elbow as she adjusts her bikini top with cherry-red nails; in another, her unrelenting gaze, a small smile playing on her lips.

At first, Furneaux tried to identify the women, asking family members if they recognized their faces. But, without any leads, she realized the significance of the work was less about fact-finding, and more her newfound understanding of her father.

“It feels like a final, new journey with him,” she explained.

Fragments of a whole

In remembering her father, Colin, Furneaux describes a man who was charismatic and playful, and an imaginative parent when she was young.

“He was a very good raconteur. He could be very funny, and people liked his company,” she said.

But he had a temper, too, she recalled, and as she grew up, their conversations often unraveled into arguments. She regarded him as emotional, but not able or willing to fully disclose what drove his mercurial moods. However, Furneaux knew that he had a painful past with his own parents: He lost his mother at 19, and had a turbulent relationship with his stepmother – his father’s secretary.

Furneaux explores these fragments of her father’s life throughout the book. She writes about a small box she found in his closet as a child, containing telegrams, postcards and letters from his youth. It was a precious collection because his stepmother had burned all the family photos and other ephemera from the past, Furneaux told CNN.

That act cast a long shadow, and is starkly different from her own mother’s reaction when the photographer asked her how it felt that they’d uncovered keepsakes from his past romances.

“You should have seen the boyfriends I had,” was her mother’s reply, according to Furneaux. She includes her mother, Barbro, as his final match, pictured in a light bikini leaning against a red car, barefoot in the woods.

Though Furneaux and her family aren’t seeking information on the women in her father’s photographs, the more she’s exhibited and published the work the more she wonders if any of them, or maybe their relatives, might come to her.

“I have thought about that a lot — a daughter who recognizes her mother or her grandmother,” she said. “That would be quite strange.”

It’s likely that most of the archive will remain an enigma, the subjects’ eyes all revealing so much and not enough at the same time. One implied gaze is perhaps the most curious — the person who took a portrait of her father in a speedo sitting on a rock, his slim frame affecting a casual pose while looking out at the ocean tides. It felt balanced to include it, Furneaux said, to “sling the gaze around” onto him. It’s only one of two images of Colin in the book, and who snapped it is a mystery. Maybe it wasn’t a lover at all. Furneaux intentionally didn’t include any couple’s shots, still finding it strange to picture her father with his past romances.

“I was happy to keep them separate,” she said.

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