The process of learning how to be a father has been a rich—and sometimes complicated—journey for documentary photographer Antoine Didienne, who has two children. His wife has always worked a full-time corporate job that requires her to be in the office while Didienne is a freelance photographer with a lot more flexibility in his schedule. It made more sense for him to stay home with the kids. “It was hard to let go of certain things in terms of pride,” Didienne says. “But my kids have always been more important than my pride.” When he saw depictions of fathers in modern culture, they were either imbued with a toxic masculinity, or overly lauded, as if taking care of your own children is somehow heroic if you aren’t a woman. But Didienne’s experience with fatherhood was much more nuanced than that. “I wanted to tell the story that I thought should be told about fatherhood in a way that made sense to me,” he says. He decided to embark on his “Portraits of My Father” project and set out to find 50 different subjects to photograph.

The most important criteria, for Didienne, was that the series was both inclusive and diverse—just like his own family. He wanted to include fathers and children of all different races, genders and sexualities, as well as many different ethnicities and backgrounds. He wanted to include fathers that were adoptive or had become fathers through marriage, and fathers that identified as transgender. “How can I talk about fatherhood if I don’t talk about everyone?” he says. He believes strongly that fatherhood is not tied to biology. “DNA has nothing to do with fatherhood,” he says. Instead, he asked himself the question, “What makes a father?” And began to answer it visually.

Finding a wide array of subjects took several years. The first subjects Didienne photographed were his brothers-in-law. Then, he began to reach out to other fathers through friends and social media, including on neighborhood groups in San Diego, where he is based. When a subject agreed to be photographed with his children, Didienne photographed them in his home studio using a Fujifilm X-T3 mirrorless camera with a Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4 R lens. “I like shooting with a wide-angle lens because it adds context to my subjects,” he says. For light, he used a Godox AD200 with a Magmood Magbox 24 Octa modifier. Ultimately, he converted each image from color to black and white. In total, he shot 53 different portraits.

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The resulting images are full of tenderness, joy and humor. What most surprised Didienne was that his subjects didn’t need to be prompted to be affectionate with one another. “I don’t have that kind of relationship with my own father,” Didienne says. He wonders if the type of dad who would volunteer to be photographed with his kids is also the type of dad who is open to physical intimacy with his children. To keep the mood authentic, he didn’t pose his subjects, and instead, started conversations that led to goofy, poignant, and emotional moments.  

Didienne hopes to turn the “Portraits of My Father” project into a book, which will also feature essays about fatherhood— including one by the father he lived with when he was a high school exchange student in Buffalo, New York. He hopes to share the book with his own father, whom he describes as a very typical post-war French dad. “Even though I’ve never talked to my own father about the photographs, we’ve become closer as I’ve shot the series,” he says. He hopes his work helps other fathers to explore—and— strengthen their relationships with their own children, no matter what kinds of labels are used to describe them. Ultimately, he hopes that every father can see himself within this photo project.