Tami Aftab is an English-Pakistani photographer based in London. Her work touches on subjects of intimacy, family, identity and play. The Rice is on the Hob was originally published as a photo-cookbook. It is a collaboration between Aftab and her father, Tony, who lives with short term memory loss following an operation that he underwent 30 years ago to treat hydrocephalus, which causes the build-up of water in the brain.

Tami first started photographing her father over five years ago, whilst still a student at London College of Communication. Keen to visibilise his daily challenges, and take pride in the family’s unique adaptations and way of life, the images often include strings of bunting lettering, with phrases including ‘the dog is in the car’ or ‘we’ve gone to the shops’. These humorous and incongruous interventions, which inspired the work’s title, reference the Post-it notes the family leave around the house to remind Tony of daily events he might easily forget. Humour emerges as another coping mechanism, but also a very genuine characteristic of this particular father-daughter dynamic.

Despite the impact memory loss has on his day-to-day life, Tony has never forgotten the dishes of his childhood in Pakistan, and is a passionate and talented chef. Food and cooking have, in fact, become another coping mechanism for living with a chronic disability, and a narrative device for Toni and Tami’s ongoing collaboration. Tami’s strongest connection to her Pakistani heritage is through food, and on visiting Pakistan with Tony to shoot for this project, it was the food that grounded her, giving a sense of home in an otherwise disorientating and frenetic Lahore. The Rice is on the Hob was originally conceived as a hybrid photobook-meets-cookbook, and brings together tender and playful portraits of Tony that demonstrate Aftab’s deftness in the languages of fashion, with scenes and characters from the food markets of Lahore. The result is a sensorial, celebratory and hospitable body of work that synthesises the powerful links between food, flavour, family and memory.