My dad took the above photo of my mother and my grandmother, on vacation at Acadia National Park, in Maine, during the summer of 1970. I’ve always thought it was a brilliant shot; the framing of each person in lineage, as if they were walking a generational line, seems serendipitous. And it was unposed. Eat your heart out, Cartier-Bresson.

My dad should have been a photographer, I have sincerely always thought this; he had an eye for composition that was innate, not taught. Using his negatives for a class in colour photography that I took in art college, I had the chance to study the pictures he’d taken, and could see his natural ability.

This was the one time my grandmother came from Türkiye to visit my mom and her family; I say my mom and her family, because I was not yet born, it was not yet my family. I was far off enough in the future as to be inconsequential. Merely conceptual, not yet conceived.

My parents had only been in Canada for five years. But they made an effort to show my grandmother a good time while she was here, hence the spontaneous road trip around the States that created the opportunity for this photo, among others. 

This is another photo he took: my mother and her mother at Niagara Falls. Something in this photo captures my mother's relationship to her mother in a way that seems obvious once you see it: the head inclined towards her, my grandmother's arm discreetly behind her daughter's back. There is a pride I can detect in my grandmother's pose; she told my mother once that she was the only one of her three daughters that she didn't worry about, even though she was all the way off in Canada.

As it was summer, and both my parents worked, my grandmother would look after my sister, who was four, and who used to run around the neighbourhood like something out of a Little Lulu comic, according to my mother. Funny because my sister's nickname has always been Loulou, a bastardization of her actual name, Laurice.

At four, she was unpredictably foul-mouthed, and when my grandmother would call after her wanting her to come home instead of roaming the neighbourhood—which my grandma didn’t really know all that well, so was worried she’d lose track of my sister—my sister would call her a “fucker face”. Seriously. At four!

Eventually, this caught up with her, when my grandmother asked my mom to translate the phrase fucker face, and realized what her four-year-old granddaughter had been calling her (to her face, mind you). She replied ay ütanmaz! in her proper, upper class Turkish, which translates to oh, shameless! But who can be mad at a four-year-old who was only parroting my father’s own foul mouth, our familial frustrations typically expressed in lucid and generous profanity.

But this is one of his finest: he took it when I was born. It's me, the apparent centre of attention, cradled by my mother, and being checked out cautiously by my sister's little hand. To me, this shot encapsulates this triad perfectly: my mother dominant but in a supportive way, my sister there, always. Me looking like I can't believe I made it, but I'm definitely relieved. I'm not sure Avedon would have done a better job.