At first sight, we are seduced by the colourful softness in Cecil Ka's images and the candor of the moments shared. But the peaceful atmosphere of childhood parties soon fades away and is replaced by something stormier and more heterogeneous. Torment follows frivolity, graveness supplants innocence. 

 

If they don't fail to evoke childhood festive pleasures, the pictures of the series are not a mere depiction of an inexpressible happiness. This familiar and everyday intimacy turns into a facetious and sometimes savage world. Threatened by violence, made up by moments of joy but also haunted by some anxiety. Celebration Day depicts a colourful portrait of what youth is.

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Childhood is less than an antithetic image of what maturity means is. And it is here seen as particular moment, a transition between two states of being, thus responding to the photographic urge for remembrance. This desire to preserve - a desire so fundamentally parental - wards off the ghost of a double disappearance : the disappearance of children's innocence ; and more radically, the disapearrance of the loved one, that absolute trasure. Far from the aesthetics of a family album, without resorting to staging, the photographer goes beyond the expected codes of the " family photography " genre to reach universality. Cecil Ka focuses on everything that can be part of a celebration day, with its hopes and delusions. Accessories, fancy dress and symbols give shape to these temporary spaces of playing, their margins and their twilight zones.

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