Capturing these honest, personal moments wasn’t always easy. Heynen said, are images of gay fathers who aren’t Instagram ready - like two men combing their daughters’ hair or tossing a football in the front yard. Celebrities like Anderson Cooper have helped normalize the idea of gay men raising children, and it no longer feels revelatory to see them on television, as it did when “Modern Family” premiered in 2009. He spent the next four years with 40 families across the country, compiling their quiet moments into his recently-released book, “Dads.”Īmerican culture has not been particularly starved of images of gay fatherhood, particularly in recent years. But after the Brooklyn shoot, he changed the concept to focus on fathers in the middle of their day-to-day realities.
His original idea was for each family to pose on the corner of their block to illustrate that, “See? We exist all over the city,” he said. Heynen planned to photograph for a book of photography featuring gay fathers and their children. “They just looked like any other parents that love their children,” he said. Heynen, himself a father of two sons, as profoundly normal. One dad was busy finishing some ironing and the other was cleaning the house, newborn son in arms.
When Bart Heynen showed up at a Brooklyn home of a family he hoped to photograph in 2015, his subjects weren’t quite ready.
