Puking Rainbows Past and Future

In December, 2020, I gave my five-year-old son a Fuji Instax camera. Over the next two years the two of us each took hundreds of photographs with the camera, often utilizing the camera’s special double-exposure setting to manifest mysteriously playful images. It’s splendid (and at the same time humbling) to witness that there is almost no difference between the quality of his work and my own. The project, originally a zine and now expanded into a book, draws its title from the early days of the pandemic when we filled an entire drawing book with drawings of all kinds of entities puking rainbows and which he scrawled in his child’s hand the enigmatic title. The book contains 80 images, 40 his and 40 mine, an essay about fatherhood by me also translated into Japanese, Tennbo’s drawings of puking creatures, my advice for him on how to approach adult life, and his observations I dutifully recorded from when he was a very young person.