Daddy Cool

Martin Magntorn, bor och arbetar som konstnär I Malmö. I sina arbeten blandar han fotografi, skulptur, text och arkivmaterial. Tematiken kretsar kring identitet, förskjutningar och förställning. Han har en Bachelor i fotografi från Högskolan för Fotografi i Göteborg och en Master i Fotografi från Akademin Valand i Göteborg. Martins verk finns representerade hos Statens Konstråd, Region Malmö och Lunds Kommuns samling. I suppose you could say, I knew my father quite well. A self-made man with a stable career. The perfect salesman, an estate agent possessing a developed psychological knowledge of how people think – and how to make people believe that they were making the decisions – when it was always him pulling the strings. I mean he was a good father, but sometimes you could get really annoyed when he was playing those same tricks at home. Near the end of his career I followed him to work in an attempt to get a more complete impression of him, photographing him and his personal belongings. We spent a lot of time together, just the two of us. Though I didn’t really know what it was I was looking for. A few years later at my father’s funeral I was struck by the realisation that his friends seemed to hold a quite different view of him. Not quite the somewhat restrained family patriarch, but more of a gambler and a joker. I found the missing pieces in my parents’ old family photo albums. In the snapshots he was more of an actor playing a role in different scenes, it’s staged photography and he is always acutely aware of the camera, even if he doesn’t always show it. I miss him, and my daughter, with whom he always seemed to have a more relaxed and playful relationship, has had a really hard time dealing with his death. However, I feel that there is still time left for me toplay about with my father, and by now I know that he would have appreciated my light-hearted remake of him. He was born in another time and had to carry on his father’s business, but I know that he had other dreams too and so I seek to show off his other talents.