Daddy

  • Ava Lightwood

  • Daddy

  • I was born an only child, August 4th 1998, in Los Angeles, California to an Afro-Dominican mother and a white father. My whole life thus far has been an effort to translate myself to the world, my photographic work is one of those efforts. Since I could remember, my race, racial ambiguity, and gender have been at the forefront of how people interact with me. My relationship with my whiteness, my blackness, my latinidad, my masculinity is most authentically told by these photos of myself and the embodiments of me as my father.

  • For some time now, I have struggled with having to look in the mirror and see my abuser. Daddy is an ongoing self portrait series documenting my journey towards a truce with the parts of myself that remind me of my father. Having an abusive, racist father as a mixed race black woman has been my largest internal battle. Beyond this form of reconciliation of self, this work also explores my relationship to gender and my own masculinity. Most importantly, Daddy is a vessel for introspection into the parts of myself I find the hardest to reconcile.