I AM NOT A MAN. OUR SOCIETY TENDS TO DEFINE US BY WHAT WE DO, AND ACCORDING TO THE LOGIC OF A COUNTRY WITH "MACHISTA" IDEALS, I MUST BE A WOMAN. I ACTUALLY LIKE TO CALL MYSELF A "HOME-DAD." I COOK, CHANGE DIAPERS, WIPE SNOTTY NOSES AND PREPARE MY CHILDREN'S SCHOOL LUNCHES. MY EVERYDAY LIFE IS A TESTIMONY TO THE LONELINESS THAT COMES WITH RAISING CHILDREN ON YOUR OWN, THE BORING ROUTINES AND THE STRESS, AND ALSO THE MAGIC IN ALL OF THAT AND MY LOVE FOR THE MOST AMAZING PEOPLE I WILL EVER MEET.
Photographing what is closest, intimacy, one’s children, can document behavior, the habitat, human relationships and their consequences in general. This isn’t about that. These are photographs that start from my decision to include myself in my own context –the situations, the relationships, the climate-, in my frame of life. I portray my children, my family and intuitively capture the supposedly inverse roles in the system of support and care that is socially more common. This is an involuntary questioning of gender roles, resonating in the gaze that others have regarding the –natural?- plan of activities, motivations and spaces that belong to men and women who engage in and practice childrearing.
As a concept, the personal documentary photography in Chocolate on my jeans represents the connection that society establishes between what one does, how one spends one’s time and gender, not through the images themselves, but through how they are seen. All of these things are externally assigned in the binary, in the patriarchy, in capitalism. In essence, they contain other things: routine, the solitary exercise of daily care and feeding, containment and weariness. The work also captures the excitement of love, which reaffirms some sorts of existence, like a certain relief.
This series explores the invisible nature of the emotional and physical cost of these tasks enunciated as the precise delivery that spontaneously emerges in the life as part of a pack. It is not an aesthetic fact or one of alternative narratives so much as an exteriorized internal verification.
Nicolas Wormull
Based in Chile, Nicolas works as a freelance photographer and as an editor. Wormull’s photography explores the concepts of family, nostalgia, and interpersonal relationships.
