Recently I ran across an article about a moving photo book from photographer Phillip Toledano called The Reluctant Father. It chronicles Toledano’s experience of the early stages of fatherhood in a way that only photos can capture. It reminded me of Choosing Fatherhood: America’s Second Chance by award-winning photographer Lewis Kostiner. National Fatherhood Initiative® helped fund, promote, and distribute that photo book. Our staff recruited dads from our partners’ fatherhood programs to participate in the project. A few staff had the pleasure of traversing the country with Kostiner for his photo shoots. The images he captured were powerful.
We’ve gotten a lot of mileage from those photos. We used them during our 20th anniversary celebration to create videos our partners can download for free and use in their work with dads. We integrated some of them into Fathering in 15™, our popular online, on-demand fatherhood program.
After we published the seventh edition of Father Facts, we created a series of Father Facts™ Images for our partners to use in their work with dads and share with others in their community. They were so popular that we created a similar set of images after we published the eighth edition of Father Facts™. Thousands of individuals and organizations have downloaded both sets of images to use on websites, in presentations, in staff trainings, and in fatherhood programs. Read this Championing Fatherhood blog article to learn more about how our partners have used the images in creative ways.
I encourage you to download both sets of Father Facts Images and share them widely. (Just scroll down the page a bit to find them.) After all, an image is worth a thousand words!
Do you use photos or other moving images in your work with dads?
If not, what creative ways could you use the power of images to promote responsible fatherhood in your services, programs, and community?
