Drunk Dad

Jeff Bark’s Drunk Dad is a deeply intimate monograph in which he presents unbridled addiction. Not as spectacle, but as a beautiful escape. Shaped by memory and longing, and by a learned idea of masculinity that resists softness while quietly demanding it. Working alone, the photographer transformed his backyard garage into a filmic, Lynchian stage, hand building masterfully lit sets and unflinching still lives. The wonderment of Disney and the loneliness of Hopper inform the photos shot on location in and around his hometown in northern Minnesota. Each image feels like a fragment of a story – at once painfully honest and hauntingly ambiguous – inviting viewers to piece together the emotional landscape of a father’s unravelling. The implosion of the American dream is palpable in almost every image.