Fathers by Jens Lüstraeten (1973) Born in Krefeld, Lüstraeten studied photography and new media at the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig and now lives and works in Berlin. This portraits series has been made during no less than six years, but the concept of the work, as we see it today, occurred just in 2001 along with the idea to express, here as in Dancers, a way of being that is marked with a light yet deep conflict: these young fathers, as they are trying to adjust to the new situation and their new role, feel inevitably uncomfortable and confused, they show themselves both proud and weak, strong and insecure. Photographed inside their own flats, whose background details, partly modified, partly left as they were, let us know something about their daily life and their personalities, all of the fathers are wearing a suit and are holding in their arms the babies wrapped in a fur or in a blanket. The choice of traditional menswear lets us think about August Sander’s portraits of patriarchs: this is an observation, and also a kind of game, on the role of the father in the past and the role of the father as it is today. On the other hand, the making of Fathers has been proceeding side by side with a wide media discussion on family roles and critically sets itself about those biased opinions that do hype up just the role of the mother-career woman. The image of the father with baby is a cliché in the advertising world, but here it is presented from an original and totally different point of view: it lets the spectator think to be in front of the portrait of a “typical generation”, and then disappoints the expectations of this simply stereotyping vision. To lead us to this direction is also the re-created atmosphere that visually refers to Beaches and New Mothers by the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra: the light, the frontal austerity, the minimal backgrounds, as well as the ability in grasping an expressiveness that is in the middle between posing and being spontaneous, draw a line between the two artists approaches that inaugurate and get ahead with a kind of introspective monumentality made of uncertainties.