The photographer Mark Mahaney lives with his wife, Jess, and their young daughter, Veda, on the outskirts of Berkeley, in a cozy house cantilevered over a creek. When Veda was a toddler and the family left home, even for a day trip, she’d tell her parents, “I want to go back to our wooden house.” Veda is nine now, but her father has thought often of that early-childhood wish since last March, when their family, like so many others, began spending most of life indoors. Mahaney, who often travelled internationally for commercial clients, has experienced the pandemic as a haze of restlessness and anxiety. During the listless days of last spring, to keep himself and Veda busy, he started shooting a series that would introduce his daughter to the essentials of photography. The photos were originally intended for a commercial pitch. When it didn’t work out, Mahaney decided to continue the project anyway, calling it, in Veda’s honor, “The Wooden House.”
“The Wooden House,” a series of whimsical domestic portraits and surreal still lifes in black and white, enlists Veda as both a model and an artist. The images rely on trippy, intricate compositions and workaday props found in and around the house: cardboard flaps torn from shipping boxes, flowers scrounged during daily walks in the neighborhood, fishing line salvaged from a neighbor’s abandoned rod. To prepare their sets, Mahaney and his daughter hole-punched avocado leaves, punctured freshly picked lemons with metal wire, and placed paper cutouts of birds in the branches of a trumpet tree. Some of their first photos experiment with the techniques that professionals have used to stage socially distanced shoots. A frosted-glass window at the front of the Mahaney house serves as a celestial scrim for indoor portraits shot from the deck and outdoor portraits shot from the foyer. In one image, Veda, backlit and braced against the glass, appears to be falling through the cosmos. In another, a transparent mask cut from vellum paper and taped to the pane conjures a picture-book fantasy—two small hands, in shadow, reach toward a moon whose friendly face has defected from the sky.
Though “The Wooden House,” at first glance, chronicles a charming father-daughter collaboration, it also reflects the ups and downs of family life under the pressures of the pandemic. For Mahaney, as for many parents, balancing his profession with the obligations of child care has been “trying to mix oil and water,” he told me. When shooting “The Wooden House,” he found himself pushing Veda’s patience. A photo of blocks toppling on a mirrored tabletop required the pair to erect and wreck the same set numerous times. A portrait of Veda’s limbs poking through crude holes in a wall of foam core forced her to still herself for a half hour in an awkward position. (A behind-the-scenes image, which Mahaney shared with me, shows Veda seated atop her father’s desk, watching a video on his iPhone while he works.) In one photo, Veda, wearing her mother’s oversized white overalls and a pair of binoculars fashioned from toilet-paper rolls, scowls as a homemade crown slides down her neck. “It got kind of annoying and stressful, because there were so many things we had to do,” she told me. According to Mahaney, a few of their sessions ended in tears.
One day last summer, after months of intermittent work on the project, Veda confessed that she didn’t want all of the newfound free time with her father funnelled into his photography. “She just said to me, ‘This is not how I want to spend time with you,’ ” he said. Though Mahaney set out to teach Veda something about photography, they ended up with a more fraught, and more formative, sort of collaboration. Mahaney has paused the project, owing to his daughter’s objections; Veda remains open to shooting the final images under certain conditions. (For one thing, she said, “I do not like standing still.”) During some of their photo shoots with the salvaged line, she’d mentioned to her father how much she wanted to go fishing. Last month, for Veda’s birthday, Mahaney took the family on a trip to a lake and left his camera behind.
