by MIRANDA WRAY LIGHTSTONE

"I was around four when he lost his toes," Amanda Tetrault recalls. "He tried to commit suicide - it was freezing, he passed out in the snow, got gangrene and they had to cut them off."

This is just one of myriad memories the 27-year-old photographer has of her father. Once heralded by Leonard Cohen as the next great poet, Philip Tetrault had his first schizophrenic episode in his early twenties, while attending McGill University. It marked the beginning of a spiral of hope and homelessness that would define his life.

"There was a lot of shame and fear," Tetrault says of her childhood. "He was living on the street and doing poorly for most of my teenage years. Phil was in and out of jail and the hospital. He'd be so ill, not taking his medications."

While growing up, Tetrault told few friends about her father's condition. She'd walk the streets of downtown, wondering when she might stumble upon him. "A streetperson is my father and he's ill. It was so hard to deal with. I used to wonder, what does it mean about me? Because we identify so much with our parents, I was scared."

She soon began confronting this complex relationship through her camera. The result is Phil and Me, a deeply personal collection of black and white photographs taken over the last eight years. Published last fall by U.K.-based Trolley Books, it includes everything from 1970s photo-booth shots of a little girl propped on her father's bouncing knee to raw portraits of a haggard Philip, often with a bottle in hand, in familiar Montreal locales.

"I needed to take the photographs," she muses. "It was kind of therapeutic for me to turn the camera on us and what was happening and it helped me get through a lot of things. None of us knew it was going to be a book."

Juxtaposed with the visuals are clippings of her father's poetry. Handwritten on scraps of paper, crumpled and often stained, they may be hard to decipher at times. However, Tetrault chose not to retype or clarify the texts in any way. "You can really feel him and our story by leaving them raw," she explains.

A skilled and sensitive photographer, Tetrault says she identified her calling early on. She received her first camera when she was 14, a gift from her grandfather. She went on to work at two of the largest photographic workshops in the world (in Rockport, Maine, and in Tuscany, Italy) as well as completing a stint at Magnum Photos in New York. For the last two years, she was employed as an assistant to one of her idols, National Geographic's Steve McCurry, famous for his magazine cover of the Afghan girl with the haunting green eyes.

Back in Montreal since the release of her book, Tetrault says she intends to ply her trade here for a while. "I just want the space to keep shooting, to be creating." She kicks off the year with an exhibition of photos from Phil and Me at BloWup Photogalerie (800 Place Victoria), Jan. 10-28.