(indistinct conversations) - Here he comes.

Here he comes.

- All right, Dad.

Let's take a look at ya.

- You feeling okay?

Dad, you feeling okay?

Hey, you know, it's almost spring, another month to go.

Valentine's Day tomorrow.

Ash Wednesday in a few weeks.

Do you have your eyes open, huh?

Get a little bit of life in there?

Always sleeping on me lately.

It's the winter, right?

We're hibernating?

(television plays in background) (camera shutter clicking) (camera shutter clicking repeatedly) I have to back up.

(rewinding) I grew up in a wonderful family, very supportive of my early inklings of becoming an artist.

My father, Gene DiRado worked for the state of Massachusetts as an artist.

If you grew up in Massachusetts, you went up to Boston Globe, and there was an artist rendering of a building, of a person, of a highway going in, you saw Gene DiRado's work.

And growing up in a house with an artist like that is that of course my father was my mentor, and not only did I see him paint, draw, and photograph for his work, but he also brought me to museums at a very young age, and he taught me how to draw and paint.

But I always very interested in his camera.

He always used the camera to make notes with, to photograph people for portraits, which he eventually then transferred to paint, or to charcoal.

And one of the great things that I loved about my father when I was very young is that he photographed gatherings during the holidays.

(slide projector clicking) [Group] - Cheese!

And I really thought that was as good as it gets.

I asked him maybe at around 10 or 11 years old, "Dad, can I borrow your camera?"

And he would say, "Kid, that's the bottom of the food chain.

You don't want to be involved with photography.

Pick up the pencil, pick up the brush.

Even better, become an architect."

Finally, I wore him down after a couple of years of pleading with him, begging with him, and he loaned me one of his cameras.

And so this particular shot, 1972 Easter, I got permission to photograph the family.

(camera shutter clicking) Here again, my father and his other siblings.

This is actually a photo I made at my grandmother's funeral, their mother's funeral.

And the thing is that I photographed all my family, all the time, unobstructed, uncensored, and that I knew very early on was an amazing gift to me, and ode to love from the family.

(camera shutter clicking) Here's a formal portrait of my mother and father and their living room.

It was about fashion, the goatee, my mother's bell-bottoms that she's wearing, and again, the core, what you see around them.

And also notice that the family is surrounded by family photos.

(camera shutter clicking) This is an example of going to the beach.

(upbeat rock) My father loved going to the beach my entire life.

It was nothing for him to call in sick on a Monday morning when he found out it was 80 degrees and clear, and in the car we went, and we were at a number of beaches up and down the New England coast.

And I'm bringing my big box camera with me, and again, documenting the family.

You know, it's kind of an honor to do this, to do any of this, photograph dad, photograph on the streets, shoot at dinner.

You know, we don't even know if this is totally legal what I'm doing in the nursing home.

And the fact that everybody there kind of turns their head to the left or to the right just a bit, knowing exactly what this is all about, which is also an amazing thing.

Alzheimer's was in the news at this point.

Drugs being introduced, you know, our generations of family and friends are growing older and living longer, and Alzheimer's is becoming the thing that everybody's talking about, and I was afraid that maybe something like this was happening to my father.

(camera shutter clicking) And there was just something about him that seemed a bit reserved, and removed, and even the possibility of him being a little depressed.

And it worried me, because I really wanted him to go on to become the artist that he talked about all his life, somebody independent.

But I felt I needed to make an appointment.

I needed to just be with him, and nobody else.

And this is the very first time that I did this, this particular October day.

I went home, developed the negative, printed it, and looked at it for a while, and thought, "All right, this is going to be routine for as far as we can take it, and see what's going on with my father."

(camera shutter clicking) He's about 60 years old at this point.

I'm 60 years old at this point right now, and so of course I reflect on where he was at at.

The conversations are short.

They're yes and they're no or maybes, and that he's not really inquisitive about what I'm doing.

And I should bring forth that earlier in my career, that he was by my side, that he was in my studio, and he was critiquing my work, and he was telling me what worked, and what didn't work, and what might be sellable, and what might be more of a fine art project.

But there was a detachment that was very unnerving.

(camera shutter clicking) This photo here even changes things for the worse, and I got a call, an emergency call that dad had a stroke, and I brought my camera; it's what I do.

With a lot of my photos that I include myself, I use a cable release that is connected to a squeeze ball, rubber little ball that you squeeze, and the air jets through it, hammering on the shutter release of the camera to have it fire off.

And so a lot of the photos that you see with me included in them is that I'm triggering the camera that particular way.

So in this shot here, I asked my father to look at the camera, and he's well enough to do this, to understand that looking at the camera is what I want him to do.

Before I made this photo, I asked him a simple question, to count to 10, and he laughed, and he said, "Absolutely," and he went, "One, two, three, four, six.

You know what?

I'm not going to do this.

That's below me.

This is ridiculous, it's absurd."

(camera shutter clicking) Even more so now than ever before, I'm very concerned about my father.

Will he fully recover from the stroke?

He can't count to ten.

There's a lot of stuff going on here.

My appointments with him are picking up.

They're now no longer a few months, they're every few weeks, and I find myself touching him, and holding him, and hugging him.

It's the only way I know how to communicate.

And so what you see here is I'm sharing this breakfast table in the kitchen with him, and really showing you that we look alike.

It really is reference to the hands, and how similar my hands are to my father.

(camera shutter clicking) This is right outside of Palm Beach.

It's Boynton Beach, Florida.

And my mother and father had been going there for, I think at this point, at least 30 years.

So here he is in the carport, standing by the door to get into the house, and while we were talking, my mother pulled into the carport with her headlights on, and it illuminated my father in a way that the, I thought very much like those early, great horror films, Frankenstein and Dracula.

The light was coming from some unearthly point of view, and it really hit me on an emotional level that he was my father, but he was also a stranger.

(birds chirping) I was gonna actually have you participate.

I'm gonna have you pick up the sun up in here, like this... so that you hit Mom from from that angle.

- [Chris] You want me to hold it?

- [Stephen] Yeah, see how it's just hitting mom like that?

Just hitting her face from the side?

- [Chris] Okay.

- [Stephen] There it is.

Hey Mom, just looking right, right at the camera.

There you go, stay very still.

One, two, and- (camera clicks) Good, we're done.

That's it.

It's like taking an x-rays.

Isn't it something?

Good, that's it.

(camera shutter clicking) This is one year later, also Boynton Beach in Florida.

My father is no longer at the center of the table.

My mother's replaced him.

She's the matriarch, and my brother and myself are in the frame on the right-hand side.

What we're doing here is we're acknowledging the camera like it's a friend, or a family member walking into the room.

A bit of a stretch at this point, because he's becoming very distracted, (camera shutter clicking) and he's got a mind of about a three or four year old.

I'm very close to my brother and sister.

I'm the eldest, by the way.

We decided that we would rotate our weekends, and that we would daddy sit.

That we'd go and spend three days with him, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, cook for him, take him out for rides, watch TV with him, play some music.

We also isolated him in not the master bedroom, but actually in my bedroom, in the children's bedroom, because at this point he was having accidents.

He was waking up three in the morning, he was disoriented, he would urinate against the wall.

We removed all the rugs, we pushed the furniture back, we gave him just a single bed to sleep in, and so here he is in this room, isolated.

And I'm going to point out, on both sides of this frame are photos of mine, and I found that incredibly sad that here he is isolated against this wall, almost like a prison room.

And the family again is disappearing, it's moving off to the edges.

(camera shutter clicking) You know, I had plenty of time on my hands to make these photos.

There's not a lot of stuff happening fast here.

We're talking hours and hours of silence, you know, negotiating food.

It was not easy for him to even eat food at this point.

A number of times he's motioned to me after I put like, a chicken breast on his plate with fork and knife nearby, for him to motion that he can't eat it, and it didn't take long for me to, I had to cut it up for him.

What you might not notice in this photo is that he's missing his eyebrows, because when he'd go in to shave, he wouldn't stop with the beard.

Then he continued starting to shave his head, and his eyebrows, and I set him up, and he's eating his chicken, and whatever green that we have in here.

And I said to him, "Dad, would you like seconds?"

And he didn't say anything.

He just kind of looked at me.

And I said, "I think you want seconds."

And I put another chicken breast in his plate.

And when I turned away to get myself a drink, the chicken breast ended up being thrown into my face, hitting the side of my head.

And I realized that was his way of saying he didn't want to have seconds.

(camera shutter clicking) And every half, hour, 40 minutes at best, he'd get up, and walk to the bathroom, and he'd come out ten minutes later, and he'd sit down.

And this went on all day.

And I said to him, "Are you okay?"

And he said, "Yes, I'm fine."

I said, "You know what?

Next time you go into the bathroom, I'm going to follow you in with my camera."

"Fine."

Sure enough, 15, 20 minutes later, he gets up, I follow him in with my camera.

You have to remember, this is about 30 pounds worth of equipment.

And he's looking at the mirror, and I'm like, "Dad, you know the deal, on a count of three, I'm gonna make the photo, stay very still."

And I set up the camera, I got the shutter release in my hand, and I'm like, "Dad, here we go.

One, two," and before I got the three, he turned around and he smiled for the camera.

And I said, "No.

No, dad look in the mirror."

And he looked at me and he said, "The man in the mirror is looking at you."

And I realized how bad this really was at this point, that he lost sense of self.

He didn't know who he was.

And it was a moment of am I exploiting my father for my own purposes?

Is this going anywhere?

Does it, is it going to be in any way helpful for others to see where this is going to go from this point on?

I looked at my father and I said, "Dad, what do we think about the man in the mirror?"

And he said to me, "I like that man."

And I said to him, "I love that man.

I think we both need to look at that man in the mirror."

And I got them to turn around, and look at the mirror, and I made this photo.

(camera shutter clicking) Not long after, my father had his second stroke, and we were talking about putting him in a nursing home in the fall, and I just, all of us felt guilty about it.

We felt that we could take care of our own.

We could take care of family, and a lot of guilt there.

And there's a gash on his head, because when he had the stroke, he fell flat on his face.

And next thing I know is that he's being admitted directly from the hospital into a nursing home.

So now we're in the nursing home.

It's a different environment.

It's not family, it's not the house we grew up in, it's an institution.

And I walk in the very first day to see my father, and my camera's over my shoulder, and I'm stopped at the front desk, and I was told I can't bring cameras in there.

And I always carry around with me in my satchel, a few photos of what I do, which is something I've been doing for 30 years.

(camera shutter clicking repeatedly) And I showed the staff and an administrator, and it was very sweet moment where they gave me permission to continue to photograph my father in the Marlborough Hills Nursing Home.

(camera shutter clicking) But at this point, now a good solid year in to the nursing home, I accepted the fact that he had Alzheimer's, and that it was advancing in it's stages.

Some days he's there, he's present.

I was a somebody.

I don't know if I was his son Stephen any more, but I was definitely somebody familiar.

I just didn't know what I was going to walk into.

I would just feel the heat of his cheek with my fingertips.

I even started to dress like him, just to blend in, knowing that I'm going to include myself in these shots.

(camera shutter clicking) You see my mother intermittently, you see, my mother goes to, she's still going to Florida, and it's encouraged by my brother and sister, all of us.

"Mom, you need to go, you need to live a normal life.

We'll take care of Dad, we'll call you up."

But my mother would come back in May, and stay from May right through into about the early part of October, or late September.

She'd come and take over.

She'd be at the nursing home a couple of times a week.

We'd all participate.

We would feed him and, you know, entertain him, walk around, and push him around in the wheelchair outside.

I'm going to bring up a point here about the relationship.

Here she is flying back from Florida, and in her home, and I'm going to take her to see her husband in the nursing home, first time in eight months, or seven months, and she's putting on makeup, and she's putting on earrings, and she's wearing clothes that are a little bit better than your regular old pedestrian clothes, because she's going to go see her husband.

- Let me hear you say hi.

Say hi.

- Say hi.

- Say hi, that's right.

He said hi, yeah.

You feeling good?

Really, huh?

That's it.

- Nothing happened that day.

I mean, she walked in, she smiled at him.

He smiled back at her.

- Beautiful.

Yeah, very good, Geno, very good.

Hi.

Hi, how are you?

(laughing) Very good.

That was a first.

- I wonder if I could replicate that again.

I don't know if he knew that this is the woman that he's been married to for decades, but it was still sweet to see my mother do that.

And, Mom, you're looking just down at Dad.

- [Mom] Yeah?

- [Stephen] Dad, you going to respond to Mom?

- Yeah.

(camera shutter clicking) - And he doesn't know who she is.

I'll make the photograph anyways.

I have to make the photograph.

It's all about moments of loss, but so important to keep this whole narrative connected.

(camera shutter clicking) A friend of mine called me from London, and asked if he could come out, and do an article about my work on my father with Alzheimer's.

"Sure, why not?

Come on out.

London Times, you're kidding me?

Of course.

This would be a great honor, a great honor for me and my father."

We walk in, he's not comfortable.

I was like, "You're going to do this article?

Are you're going to write about this?

You're not asking many questions."

He's like, "You know, I'm really not sure.

I really don't feel good about this."

And here's my father in front of us, taking on this tick, hand to head, back down, hand to head.

And I said to him, "I'm going to make this photo."

And he was like, "How could you do this?

How could you make this photo?

This is, this is horrifying."

And I'm like, "But it's the disease.

More often than not, I'm finding my father distressed like this."

And I set up the camera, and I timed it, and I realized that if I left the lens open for one second, that I would capture the full motion of the hand up to the face, then down by the chest.

Hit the shutter release, click (camera shutter clicking), one second, and Simon said to me, "How do you know that's the truth?"

And that word truth in any medium pisses me off.

But I said to him, "All right, you want to see something different?"

And I set up my camera, put another sheet in, cocked the lens, got the cable release ready.

And I went over to my father, and I yelled out, "Gene," and he stopped, and he looked at me, and I took my head and I butted his head with it, and he looked at me and he smiled, and I hit the release.

And right after that, he went back to this tick, back and forth.

So you tell me which one is truthful for the day?

(camera shutter clicking) This is a good time to bring up something about my brother, Chris.

He never found going to the nursing home comfortable whatsoever.

My sister was fine with it, you know, fine with it.

I mean, nobody's fine with it.

My brother found it very, very difficult.

And I happened to have a digital movie camera with me that I bought it for a project that never happened.

So I gave him this camera, and I said to him, "Make it your job as well.

Why don't you make it your job to come and photograph us?"

And he liked that idea, and he started coming more frequently, and it got to the point, with great pride, that sometimes he'd be waiting in the parking lot for me to pull in so he can film me getting out of the car, and taking the camera, and walking into the nursing home with it.

And even some days he would say, "Can we stick around just a bit longer to make the film?"

It's a long way from him earlier not knowing what to do.

- [Chris] Want to do it again?

(camera shutter clicking) - (sighs) I don't know what to call it, a very bad photo, a very bad moment.

Finding my father isolated like this, like a raggedy doll.

Sometimes I show it, sometimes I don't show it.

(camera shutter clicking) I walk in, and he's sitting there, and there's this beach ball, a globe of the earth in front of him.

Oh my God, it's like the last scene in 2001.

And we all know in the movie, that it ends with death, and rebirth, with this fetus, this child looking over the earth.

Dad, listen to the music.

Can you listen to the music?

♪ The same thing too ♪ Listen to the music, stay still, one, Listen to the music, stay still, one, (camera shutter clicking) ♪ Merry Christmas, merry Christmas ♪ Excellent.

We got it.

(camera shutter clicking) December 10th, 2009, and I get the call.

Dad is having renal failure.

I just felt that we needed to go in.

It wasn't immediate that he was going to pass away, but his time was finite.

They said maybe a week, two weeks.

We called my mother, she's in Florida.

"Mom, you need to come back now."

So I meet my sister, and my brother, and I bring my wife with me, and my father is...that's the thing, I've never been there late in the evening.

I've never been there past seven or eight o'clock in the evening, but he's all covered in white sheets, and he's in a fetal position.

It was very different than I normally shoot, and I was really nervous.

I was really, really nervous, because I just felt all of those signals, and signs, or whatever you want to call them of the last couple of weeks, now are making sense, that it really is the end, or very shortly, the end.

What's that?

- I like the blanket.

Where'd you get that?

- It's nice and soft, Gene.

Gene, your blanket.

- It's nice, isn't it?

It's fleece.

- [Stephen] My mother's not there, but I wanted her to be there, so I literally just threw a reflection in a shadow, not a reflection, but a shadow my sister into the frame, and I went to hit the shutter on the camera.

(camera shutter clicking) I screwed up, I left the lens open.

I ruined the sheet of film.

Apologized to everybody, took that sheet out, threw it away, put another sheet in the camera, go to hit the shutter, and I screw up.

I had the wrong F-stop, meaning things were in focus that shouldn't have been in focus.

So I changed everything.

I went through a trial run, put another flashbulb into unit that I had, to cast light across the room, and I hit the shutter, and this one worked.

(indistinct conversation) I went in Friday morning, my mother's en route from Florida, and my father's bad.

I asked the nurses what was going on.

They said, "Oh, the renal failure is really accelerated."

"How long do you give him?"

"We give him a week."

And I'm like, "Yeah, he doesn't need to do this anymore."

So I went over to his bed.

You're going to go down as one of the great artists, Dad.

We did great stuff together.

We did great, great stuff together, you and me, thanks to you.

You trained me well.

You should be very proud.

You did a fantastic job.

Great dad, and a great teacher.

You didn't have to say it in a lot of words, because the words that you said were very powerful and meaningful.

Yeah.

Damn good.

And I said, "Dad, you don't need to do this anymore.

You're too good of a person.

This body has failed you miserably.

You need to move on."

I called my sister up, I called my brother up, and I said, "You need to come in here now," and within an hour, they were both there.

And I said to them, "We need to tell Dad to go."

And my brother's like, "Okay, I can do this, and Dad, we love you."

- We're here, we're here.

- [Stephen] And my sister shows up and I'm like, "Gina, you need to tell Dad to go."

And she said, "Dad, Mom loves you, we love you, and we all know you love us," and he left.

He was gone.

It's about 12 noon.

My brother filmed it.

(chuckles) Another friend who was in the room photographing it.

And there were no angels.

There were no trumpets.

There was nothing.

He just left.

You're going to a much better place.

I just want you to tell me after you go, what it's all about, promise.

And I said to him, "Come back and mess with us."

I don't know where that came from.

I still shake my head with a smile.

It's just a crazy thing to say.

"Mom, do you want to go back to the nursing home to see the body?"

"No, why would I want to do that?

I'll see him tomorrow morning at the funeral home."

She planned everything.

Everything was all taken care of.

- All that's already done.

Everything's all done.

- [Stephen] And she says, "You kids must be hungry.

What kind of pizzas do you want?

We'll call on Papa Gino's and order two pizzas."

So I say, "Yeah, my plain cheese pizza."

My sister says, "I'll have an onion pizza."

We get to the house, my sister says, "Oh, I'll go get the pizzas."

And then in the interim, my wife shows up, and my brother-in-law, and they say, "Oh, if we'd known you were going to get pizzas, we would have ordered a pepperoni and a sausage pizza."

My sister comes back minutes later with four pizzas, not two.

Yes, you're right, one was a sausage, and the other one was a pepperoni.

And she said, "They screwed up the order.

They just gave me these pizzas.

The person didn't come by, and they were getting cold."

And when she opened them up, and everybody has said, "These are the pizzas that we were hoping to get if we'd known you were putting the order in."

And she looked at me and says, "Tell Dad to stop it.

This is freaking me out."

♪ Darling I can hear your voice heavy and then sad ♪ ♪ I bring flashes for your good dreams ♪ ♪ Locket for your bad ♪ ♪ Darling don't you worry ♪ ♪ For the next life will be grand ♪ ♪ Let your heart ache where it will ♪ ♪ Let your body land ♪ ♪ Not so long missing you ♪ ♪ Not so long without you ♪ ♪ I can hear them calling after you ♪ My mother continued to go to Florida year after year, vibrant, young, 87 years old young today.

And the last couple of months, she decided that Florida was no longer part of her tally, and that she was going to come home and stay.

I think one of the things that she said to me is that, "You know, you could die down there.

The doctors are not good like they are here in Massachusetts."

So I started photographing my mother.

I started going down to see her.

I was like, "Hey, what are you doing for the afternoon?

Are you gonna be around?"

"Well, I'm volunteering to drive people for chemo, or I'm going to go play mahjong at the local senior center."

It's like, "Will you get be home in the afternoon?"

"Yeah, I'll be around for about three hours, if you can fit me in."

So I've been going down, and hanging out with my mother, and making photos like what you see here.

Life goes on, that's all it is.

It's just, life goes on, and my mother has a very fortunate later in life, life, and for the first time in all my life with my mother, she's my rock star.

Good, how about that?

That might be a better ending.

♪ Not so long missing you ♪ ♪ Not so long without you ♪ ♪ I can hear them calling out for you ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪