Like Father

Terry Richardson photographs naked girls desperate for fame, already famous, or too strange to ignore—everyone knows this about him. But he also documents his own life with the same flat, unsparing eye. When his mother died, he posted her final hours on his blog, and suddenly the condolence messages from agencies and magazines started piling up like he’d done something generous.

This week he posted photographs from his book Mom & Dad. It would have been his father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Bob George Richardson was a photographer too, back in the old New York days, and he died in 2005. That’s more than twenty years now.

Photographers photograph everything, which means they end up with an archive of their own lives that’s every bit as unsentimental as their work with strangers. Maybe that’s the only kind of honesty that survives—not what you choose to show, but what you choose to frame.