One type of photography is self-prominent. The muddy camp at dawn, the crammed rubber dinghy, and the child caught in the middle of crying are all familiar to you. It is effective because it is real and because people are moved by suffering when it is presented on a suitable scale. However, it also flattens. Before they become people, the men and women in those pictures become symbols, and whatever made them unique is removed somewhere between the shutter click and the front page.
Tim Smyth took a different approach. His series, My Son’s Absence, which was created during a residency associated with the Festival Dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, originated from something far less glamorous than crisis photography: lengthy discussions in the suburbs of a hill town in central Italy with men who had traveled to Europe from Niger, Togo, Guinea, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone and were now living quietly on the outskirts of a location that most tourists go to hear opera. He didn’t take any pictures of the trip. He took pictures of what followed and what appeared on those faces after they had stopped moving.
Just the title does some worthwhile work. The absence isn’t presented as a disaster. It is presented as the typical grief of a father—the particular, domestic pain of a son who is away. The whole point of contention is that change in register. Smyth is refusing to use displacement as a spectacle in his narrative. Instead, he is arguing that these men bear the same burden that everyone bears when a loved one lives far away. Whether you find that generous or reductive likely reflects your preconceived notions about immigrants.
Knowing where this fits into Smyth’s larger body of work is helpful. He is the same photographer who spent more than a year transporting malformed carrots from a North Yorkshire farm to a studio in London, where they were arranged under controlled light with the kind of attention typically given to portraiture. These pictures are now part of Yale’s and MoMA’s permanent collections. Fundamentally, the Defective Carrots project was about visibility: what is considered worthy of careful examination and what is classified as defective. The question posed by My Son’s Absence is nearly the same. The topics shift. The investigation doesn’t.
By documentary standards, Smyth’s approach to the Spoleto migrants was slow. No sense of a deadline forming the frame, no hurried access. He took his time, which seems obvious when you think about how infrequently it actually occurs. The majority of migration-related photojournalism revolves around movement, including crossing, arriving, and being intercepted. The pause piqued Smyth’s curiosity. When a conversation about a son back home has been going on for an hour, men appear as though they have stopped moving and are now waiting. There’s a feeling that only that level of patience could have produced the images. The level of attention they carry cannot be replicated.
When it comes to vulnerability, photography is always faced with the question of whether the subject is served or consumed by the camera. With only access and equipment, Magnum photographer Mark Power once said he felt “helpless” while filming refugee camps. Smyth avoids that paralysis without acting as though it doesn’t happen. He appears to understand that taking a picture of someone’s grief is never just a picture; it’s also a transaction, and the fact that the intention was good doesn’t make it any less morally significant. It’s still unclear if My Son’s Absence completely eases that tension. It refuses to disregard it.
When you see the work, the ordinariness is what sticks with you. The men are not performing suffering. When someone has consented to be photographed by someone they have actually spoken to, they are present in the picture in the same way. It’s a minor issue. It has a huge impact. Smyth’s series is doing something more subdued and likely less viral in a media landscape that values scale and intensity: it is arguing that a father missing his son is sufficient news.
