Ollie Gapper has a keen interest in the contemporary photobook and its intimate connection with readership. His work explores the relationship of photography and writing with failure, fracturing, fragmentation and repetition.

 explores the gradual loss of Gapper’s father to neurological diseases. His father has multiple health conditions which have advanced to create dementia-like symptoms. His mobility has been hampered for all of Gapper’s lifetime, but it is only in the past five years that his mental faculties have been markedly affected. Through the use of repetition and fragmentation, Gapper’s photographs and writing aim to disrupt the viewer’s experience and force a heightened connection with the work. Quiet observations of daily life are recorded though his writing and the photographs. Written passages and photographs reverberate off each other and neither take prominence in the presentation of the work. The artist shifts between the roles of son, carer and creator. This work is about a journey to coping, accepting the inevitable mortality of a loved one, and the fading of their persona. On this site the sequence randomly generates, allowing for all manner of fleeting combinations, images are obscured and sometimes even disappear – loss, unpredictability and frustration embedded from the work itself.

He has a look now – so lost, so vacant. For those brief moments his face empties, his eyes part and he is gone. His blinks stall into flutters and his eyeballs receded into his gaunt face.

It makes me so angry in such a flash. I struggle not to lose myself to the rage that flashes over me. I bite it down – absorb it into wherever such ugliness came. Not today, not now.

I feel terribly anxious writing this, for reasons I don’t want to commit to paper, but I will. First, this is a new notebook and the infinite possibilities presented by its blank pages are (as is always the case) slowly disappointed with the finite shape of their inevitable marks. Be they prose, poetry, notes, letters or lists, the responsibility placed on the markee of the new notebook, of transforming the potential ‘anything’ into the definite ‘thing’ is enormous.

Compounding this is the sub-optimal pen choice open to me at this moment – though I am enjoying what this pen has to say.

Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, I am dreading the words I will be placing on this and subsequent pages. This next sentence being the first of many that I am literally struggling to write. This book is about the loss of my Father, as it happens, day-by-day. My heart is racing and my eyes vibrating at just seeing those words leak from this pen.

Its a constant struggle, the balancing in your own mind of your role as carer for an ageing or unwell parent, particularly when safety, security and wellbeing fall within your responsibilities.

Care or control? Always an outsider’s eye seen through your own.

Removing worry or liberty? Surely one needs the other, but to allow fear a place feels unnatural.

At first his symptoms are subtle and infrequent, slowly building in you a dreadful suspicion of what is to come. This feels like hypersensitivity, paranoia, over-thinking. At this point you yearn for certainty one way or the other – until you get it.

As things become more certain you realise how foolish you were letting the vague hope of uncertainty slip by so unappreciated.

Time and temporality are such abstract concepts when it comes to actual lived experience. For Dad, it is impossible to identify the moments he lost the ability to paint, or cook, or eat, or drive, or have a conversation, or clear thought, and yet we find ourselves here, stood the other side trying to pick up the pieces – to reverse the overwhelming tide.

I don’t know when mum lost the man she married, but her loneliness is one thing I don’t think I could ever live with.

It can be very hard at times to not give into the frustration, the anger, the resentment; to hold in the nasty knee-jerk reactions and vile tongue-lashings whose only guaranteed result is hurt regret and guilt.

Today I saw raw, unfiltered fear on the face of my dad, like that of a child for whom the dizzying realisation of being lost has suddenly stuck. The crushing thing, and perhaps the thing that led to my own absorption of his fear was the context – or lack thereof – it arose from.

It was a transient, passing moment; a ‘hello’ that should have barely registered with either of us. He now constantly uses greetings as a means of gauging emotion – its as though he can’t do this in a less overt way anymore. Whatever the reason, behind each “you alright, mate?”, “morning, sleep well?” or “you ok?” is a trembling layer of fear that no one can assuage.

The notion of “pushing” has been on my mind ever since I wrote it; it should be a completely alien concept to someone describing ‘loss’, but the nuances of the situation are more complex than that. In simple terms I suppose I would describe it as a resistance to/pushing away of what presents itself as the growing void sitting in occupation of my father. We’re not pushing him away, we are futilely pushing away the thing that is taking him from us.

Looking back, Gracie’s birth was the last time dad was really fully there; I was in the selfish honeymoon phase of my relationship with Christine, one step removed and oblivious to what was unravelling before my sister, my mum and dad. While I chased moments of maturity and fleeting pleasures, my sister Hannah laboured her first full-term pregnancy, only to have her baby snatched away and placed on incubation minutes from being born.

My dad would drive, and cook, and worry with mum, and for me. Thinking back to my distance now, I feel both ashamed and passionately angry with myself. This, among so much of what I have been through with my mum in subsequent years as Gracie got ill, and Hannah got ill, and dad got ill, is what tempers my resolve in staying close, always. The idea of ever allowing such nightmares to be faced in solitude is just unthinkably cruel.

I once sat in the waiting room of an ICU ward in London, waiting for my ventilated sister to be readied for visitors, when I decided to begin writing about the Romany family I shared the small stuffy room with. As they quietly ate a packed lunch and spoke in a tongue unfamiliar to my ear, I recall becoming quite enamoured with them, using descriptors of beauty and elegance in my prose. I can’t find that notebook now.

I’ve not written here for a few days; as the days grow shorter it was just a matter of time before I contracted the floating cold virus doing the rounds. Come eight o’clock I have been bed-bound.

Today it struck me how difficult conversation has become with Dad. I caught myself second-guessing how I should explain to my father which pack of dog food to use first… if he is struggling with holding on to information as simple as this, what must his daily thought processes be like?

One area of solace has been his recently re-kindled passion for painting. Thanks to my sister’s initiative he now finds time almost everyday to busily invest time into a new sheet of watercolour paper.
He’s still there. He’s just struggling.

Helping him into a comfortable sleeping position he won’t snore in has become a regular bedtime routine now. Through careful and deliberate manipulation, he finally falls into place; a fairly standard recovery position, and he thanks me. There is no shame or embarrassment exchanged, we are like two labourers lending a hand to move something. My distance is deliberate and selfish, but appreciated.

I know mum and I are highly strung at the best of times, and I know this doesn’t always align itself well with the care of someone like Dad, but we have to allow ourselves this flaw I think; we just desire control over that which we can control, when so much is outside of it. How we deal with our reactions though is quite another thing.

My sister is terribly ill at the moment, and much of our time is spent next to her hospital bed reassuring her that this isn’t the end for her; she is no hypochondriac, her hospitalisation was instigated by her loosing so much blood from a poorly healed stoma site that she needed two blood transfusions. In fact, this is the second time this has happened in the last few months, the first time she required four transfusions plus plasma. I don’t really understand what that means, but I know that transfusions are serious, and the sense of her life being held by thin, tenuous threads is palpable.

I don’t know what or how to write about this really, this feeling of being totally out of control of something so massive is utterly overwhelming. An American relative sends prayers that speak of our temporary suffering, and I find it hard to decipher whether she is referring to my sister’s illness or mortality. If its the former, I’ll put all my religious faith behind these prayers, if it’s the latter then I can’t even handle saying it out loud. My mum and I are inseparable at the moment, as we always are in crisis. My father is an island overcome by the tide, a faint sandbar or distant shallow gasping for the warmth of the sun and air. He is distant, muffled, confused. He begins conversations he doesn’t follow, he contributes to discussions with questions that do little more than confuse the syntax of the situation. He is trying so hard to keep his head in this and yet I
can do nothing to support him - I’m drowning myself.

Something strange and remarkable has happened. I was denied PIP for the first time in my life – something I have always dreaded, accepted as inevitable, and longed for.

I lose the financial support for my car, meaning that goes and I must find my way using other funds (that don’t yet exist).

What they have said is ever so close to them saying they don’t believe me… and yet…

This feels like the best news I could have received. I’m free. ‘They’ have nothing to do with my life or body anymore. They never will again.

I walked my dog today, twice. It feels amazing.