Forty-eight fathers sit for Harry Borden in Single Dad, and each is photographed rather than explained. Hoxton Mini Press published the book in 2021, with a foreword by Bob Geldof. Its subject is a figure usually reduced to shorthand: the man raising children on his own, whose public image, Borden argues, has been distorted by worn-out notions of masculinity — the stoic provider, the distant working father, the one who copes without needing anyone.

Borden comes to the work from inside it. A separated father of four, he photographs men who arrived at single parenthood through loss and then had to rebuild around the daily labour of care. The portraits are close and unhurried, and they are paired with the fathers’ own accounts: grief, the difficulty of adjusting, the slow return of purpose, the affection of children. Tenderness and vulnerability are the point; the pictures neither flinch from them nor make them sentimental.

This is Borden’s second book, after Survivor: A Portrait of the Survivors of the Holocaust (2017), and the two projects share a method — sustained portraiture of people whose lives have been altered by circumstance, set beside testimony that keeps the images honest. That method gives Single Dad a place in an argument still running about what fatherhood and masculinity look like now, and the book puts itself inside that argument rather than above it.

For a collector, the interest lies in the combination: a photographer working at a scale tight enough to stay rigorous — forty-eight sitters, one line of enquiry — and a form, portrait joined to first-person voice, that gives pictures weight beyond likeness. The hardcover runs to 112 pages. It appeared in Amateur Photographer’s 2021 year-end selection, an early indication of how the work found its readers.