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.