Photography is often understood as evidence that something happened. Someone stood somewhere at a particular moment and the camera registered their presence. Family photography depends heavily upon this assumption. The image becomes part of the record through which a family later understands itself.

Transparent unsettles that certainty.

Over six months, William carefully removed his father from selected family photographs. Yet the project is more complicated than an act of erasure. He reconstructs the visual information behind the missing figure, creating versions of these spaces as though his father had never occupied them at all.

A doorway continues behind the body that once interrupted it. A beach remains without the person who once stood within the landscape. Parts of rooms are rebuilt. The image closes around the absence.

The result is something closer to counterfactual photography. These photographs depict circumstances that appear entirely plausible but were never actually photographed. They present an alternative version of family history in which the surrounding world remains intact while one person has been removed from it.

The question therefore becomes larger than disappearance. William asks what kind of reality is produced once an absence has been made visually complete.

Family photographs have never been neutral records. Every archive is shaped by decisions, whether deliberate or accidental. Someone chooses when to raise the camera. Someone remains behind it.

Certain events are photographed repeatedly while long periods of ordinary life may leave almost no visual trace. Images are lost, discarded, damaged or kept. What survives gradually comes to represent what happened.

William’s discovery that his father appeared predominantly in photographs made during birthdays and holidays exposes this selectivity. An archive does not necessarily measure how present someone was within a life. It records the moments in which photography itself became present.

By intervening in these photographs, William takes that instability further. He produces an alternative image and allows it to exist with the original. The work begins to move between remembrance and fabrication, between a documented past and one that has been reconstructed after the fact.

Once his father disappears, the spaces begin to take on greater significance.

In the original photographs, environments may have functioned only as backgrounds. Following William’s intervention, they become the surviving subjects. The viewer begins to look differently at the ordinary architecture of family life, at walls, furniture, landscapes and domestic spaces that have outlasted the person whose presence once gave the image much of its meaning.

There is something precise in this shift. Grief often involves confronting the persistence of the material world. Places remain. Objects remain. Familiar environments continue to exist despite the absence of the person through whom they were once understood.

William extends this idea through the final physical form of the work. The altered photographs become lenticular prints, causing the image to change according to the viewer’s position. Presence and absence cannot be encountered from a single fixed point. The viewer must move, and with that movement the photograph changes.

The process gives physical form to the way memory alters over time. Details sharpen, recede or disappear. What once seemed certain can be revised by distance, later knowledge or the simple passage of years.

The photograph, like memory, refuses to remain fixed.