In Father and Child, Fatherhood—With the Help of Several Famous Faces—Gets Its Artistic Due

The image of mother and child has existed in art almost as long as art has existed itself: the Virgin Mary and Jesus have been painted tenderly by artists from Duccio to Donatello, their depictions hanging in museums from the Met to the Louvre.

Fathers and children? Not so much. And when they are, the depictions often lean dark and sinister. (See: Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.)

This fact was not lost on photographer Claiborne Swanson Frank. In 2018, her book Mother and Child—which captured fashionable mothers like Carolina Herrera and their children—was published by Assouline; it’s now in its ninth edition. Yet as she raised her own two boys with her husband, she witnessed first-hand the beauty of the paternal bond: “What blew my mind was the intimacy and the connection of a father and their children,” she tells Vogue.

Photo: Courtesy of Assouline

So she finally decided to give fathers their due. On May 22, she publishes Father and Child with Assouline.

Father and Child captures fathers from Eli Manning to James Van Der Beek, posing with their children in a remarkably unguarded lens. Although “posing” might not be the most apt term here: some of the fathers quite literally sit for Swanson. Yet others are captured roughhousing or carrying their child over their shoulders. “They almost were more childlike in their ability to be photographed because they were so unaware of themselves in a way,” Swanson Frank says of her fathers.

She took great care to capture their families either at home or near them: Rashid Johnson is photographed at his artist studio in Amangansett, whereas documentary filmmaker and mountain climber Jimmy Chin is shot in front of the Grand Tetons. Brunello Cucinelli, meanwhile, sits for a multi-generational portrait with children and grandchildren at his villa in a Solomeo, Italy. (The designer also wrote the foreword for the book.) “I wanted to photograph each family in environments that they connected to and felt to be a part of their family,” says Frank.

Yes, Father and Child is a visually beautiful book. But Swanson Frank hopes that it will go deeper than that—and honor the story of fatherhood itself.