Daddy’s Girls

In 2004, I began processing my father’s nudes in the computer. This exciting collaboration became the series entitled, “Daddy’s Girls.” My father, Sanford E. Kaps, was an eye doctor by profession and a passionate hobby photographer. Soon after his death in 1987, I discovered a cache of negatives, prints and slides in the filing cabinet outside his darkroom in the basement of our house. The nudes were among thousands of other images ranging from baby pictures of my sister and I to intimate stage shots of music and dance greats to extensive travelogues of the Far East . I was enthralled by these images, which were no secret to my mother; in fact some of the nudes had been shot in that very same basement in Tenafly , New Jersey . The photographs possessed my father’s adoration of classical art and photography and for his love of women, and sex. So this treasure, my father’s legacy, possessed something of the forbidden, something innocent and yet taboo.