Photography: The Adventures of Sailor Tom

Olivia: concept, costume design, photography James Wafer, Bluewhistle. Make-up by Liv

A personal project - my son Thomas, back to his time on the high seas

There was once a time my son would let me photograph him - not always successfully and not with as much high-jinx and gusto as shown here, but it would happen.

Tom is an amazing young man, smart, funny, super-kind and with a dash of neurodivergant brilliance. As a family we shared many loves and some of these included, and I'll list: early Micky Mouse comics, silent movies, the golden age of Hollywood and generally messing about or being deadly serious in what we do. It's important this stuff.

You can see all this in the shoot. Why just settle with a well-lit shot of my youngest boy when we can throw an old-lemonade crate infront of a white backdrop and don a sailor hat found in a charity shop and bring out a young James Cagney style nautical picture-show.

When both my boys were young, the scariest film they knew of was the original 1923 Nosefertau and the most violent and hard-hitting was1931s Public Enemy with the afore mentioned James Cagney. They would actually watch these films with me and love them. How life has changed, the Netflix and Amazon Prime movies of today contain a million F-bombs and the most graphic slurs. The violence is creative beyond entertainment and somewhere along the way, the plot lost the plot. That latest Deadpool/Wolverine movie just left me feeling uneasy. Not that I don't enjoy a lot of today's films I'm a massive fan but I enjoyed protecting my boys from the harsher world we live in, a world that celebrates and cartoonises so many negative things. Anyway... all shot on a Pentax KP with a Sigma 30mm EX lens.