Haymes’s love for the next generation lies at the core of his work. “I photograph youth culture because there’s something intrinsically fantastic about it,” he says. “There is an optimism that at some point you lose. It’s like, oh my God, the world is falling apart, what are we going to do? But at some point you’ll listen to a 20-year-old, and think, maybe you’re right, maybe it can change, and why not? It’s good to hear.”
With Chronograph, Haymes devoted a quarter of a century to photographing his family, allowing the story to unfold at the natural pace of life, while his publisher Bruno Ceschel waited patiently for 15 years until the story was complete. Bookended by death – collective and personal – Haymes reimagines the domestic narrative through the lens of fatherhood, a vantage point unexplored despite the preponderance of men across all disciplines of the photo industry.
For the better part of photography history, the domestic interior has been largely disregarded as a serious space, in no small part due to the fact it has been dominated by women artists such as Sally Mann, Tina Barney, Melonie Bennett, Judith Black, and Susan Kandel. But in more recent years, institutions have finally embraced what visionaries have always known: our first, most profound experience of photography is the family photo album. Here we discover ourselves and loved ones cast against the backdrop of ancestry and lineage cast among snapshots of moments both grand and intimate.
