London-based photographer Caroline Furneaux faced these questions after sifting through boxes of her father’s 35mm slides in the years following his sudden death in his 70s. She’d had a complex relationship with him, and felt as if his death in 2011 left things unresolved, she explained in a phone call. She let the archive sit for some time, expecting a familiar array of pictures taken during his compulsory national service, or perhaps his documentation of crop growth while working as an agronomist in Sweden.
Instead, peering into her father’s handheld slide viewer, she found sun-kissed women she’d never seen, sitting in convertibles, posing on rocks at the beach or gathering wildflowers by the sea. Taken in the 1960s before he married, many in Sweden, the portraits may have been a series of girlfriends, flings or strangers.