Zun Lee: Father Figure – Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood

Zun Lee is an award-winning visual storyteller, physician and educator who divides his time between Canada and the US. He was born and raised in Germany and has also lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago.

USA – 

Widely hailed as a landmark project, Photography feature – Zun Lee’s monograph is at once documentary photography and personal visual storytelling. Through intimate black-and-white frames, Father Figure: Exploring Alternate Notions of Black Fatherhood provides insight into often-overlooked aspects of African-descended family life.

 
The reader gains an intimate view into the daily lives of black men whom Lee has worked with since 2011 and who are parenting under a variety of circumstances – as married fathers, single fathers, social fathers, young and older, middle class and poorer. Lee brings into focus what pervasive father absence stereotypes have distorted – real fathers who are involved in their children’s lives. Men who may not be perfect but are not media caricatures.

unnamed (20)
 
 
Zun Lee’s journey of fatherlessness and identity formation informs his insider perspective and photographic approach. Using his own biography as inspiration, Lee is able to access a complex subject matter with profound vulnerability and compassion, creating a richly woven narrative that is deceptively simple yet multi-dimensional and above all, deeply humanistic.

 
Flanked by writer and photographer Teju Cole’s empathetic foreword and by an impassioned afterword courtesy of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee, this work exposes the viewer to aspects of black male identity that many have not seen, or perhaps do not want to see. It shows these men not as victims of their circumstances but as empowered agents in their own lives, as capable parents, and above all as loving, wholesome human beings.

Related Posts

First Photobook Award Winner: Hidden Islam

France –  The entry to this years’s Award were rifle with gatefolds and Hidden Islam uses this device on every ...

Asger Carlsen: From Crime-Photography to Mutilated, Disfigured Human Form

USA – Asger Carlsen’s images consist of mutilated, disfigured and distorted human forms with a typical obscure quality to them. He ...

Roger Ballen: ‘Maybe I can speak goat, and I can speak a little chicken’

South Africa –    Celebrated Photographer Roger Ballen has been photographing for around 50 years mostly in Johannesburg, South Africa. ...

Football’s Lost Boys – Jason Andrew

Turkey – One evening in the basement of an Internet café in the Sisli neighbourhood of Istanbul, a small group ...

Karin Bareman: The Emperor’s New Clothes

USA – As is so often the case, it is the title that draws me in. The Furtastic Adventures of ...

Stalin K: “Without activism, there would be no journalism, and no photo series”

India –  Documentary filmmaker, media trainer and human rights activist, Stalin K co-founded the international community media organisation, Video Volunteers. The organisation provides ...

Eriko Koga: “Issan” – Magical visit to 1200 year old monastery in Mt. Koya

Japan – In 2009, photographer Eriko Koga visited Mt. Kōya, home of a 1,200 year old Buddhist monastery in the ...

Richland : Gustavo Jononovich

Argentina – On behalf of “progress” we have transformed our environment into the lifeblood of our economy. Everything we manufacture ...

Ren Hang

THIS STORY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT China – Photographer and poet, Ren Hang was born in Changchun, in northeast China in ...