“We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys” is a series depicting the increasingly incomplete, complicated, and inescapable relationship with my father as he passed away due to brain cancer last year. The events and characters included into this series of images is meant to relay the underlying anxiety and conflicting feelings towards my father, and the means of which his influence changes the meaning of the literal land I inhabited away from him, and the manner of which my relationships with death, religion, purpose, and interpersonal love has become a mirror for our unclosed and fraught father/son bond. After my father’s passing, I began to see him as a character in my unconscious thoughts, a central albeit intangible force that continues to leer and haunt in the periphery, a “Phantom” of sorts. “The May air deluged through his spectral skin, and we remained on the concrete sharing our meager dinner. The horizon billowed into a drab blue the longer we refused to face each other, and the sweat caked to us like dry ash. The lots emptied in a hum, and we chose to continue sitting there, as two lamenting bodies upon the small hill. We continued eating, watching as the engines trekked against the gravel road, lazily drifting off into the black periphery. He wouldn’t look at me, as if being seen was already too much to bear. I didn’t want to get up, and neither did he, as we continued detachedly plucking at the fried skin of the chicken within the plastic. We just wanted to watch. This journey had me reaffirm what I wanted, to be a Phantom. To disengage. To relinquish my need to be seen. Eventually, we stayed to admire even the clouds settling into their ephemeral forms, becoming wisps of drifting white paint, and as I looked back at him, I could recognize only the Phantom, and no one else. My stepmother sent me pictures of his corpse, telling me how he wanted to be burned. His eyes clasped, mouth ajar, my father’s dangly body in a suit far too large for his twig bones now. When we burned incense at a temple, a wafting ash smell had arose that reminded me of the air that made me sick those months I was with him. In the following summer after the Phantom’s End, the air was tainted in that smell, the city became imperceptible, and I felt sick again. All I remember now is how that summer ended in an ash sky.” The manner of which I wanted to depict the characters in this story is intended to be one of ambivalence towards paternal figures, a fragile male image, and a reveal of past-tense failure and pervasive anxieties towards all of the above. By exploring the central relationship of my father and I within this story, I’m seeking to comment further on an underlying unresolved tension between the male self-image, especially in the context of marriage and the idea of a ghostly, ever-present influence affecting the emotional conflict between men amongst themselves, and this pervading into domestic/romantic relationships as well, as depicted in the religious iconography, and vast non-flourished landscapes.