A photographer captures the intimate details of an everyday life
I discovered Deanna Dikeman’s work through an article from The New Yorker, where they talked about her work 90 Good-byes. This body of work comprises images of her parents saying goodbye taken over 27 years.
In 1986, Deanna Dikeman began portraying the life of her relatives. For years, she documented the personal moments that determined their perception of home, security and belonging. In 1990, her parents sold her childhood home in Sioux City, Iowa. They moved to a ranch in the same city, which they filled with the same furniture. Dikeman realized then that what was now her parents’ new home was also her new home. The photographer was thirty at the time and her parents were in their seventies.
Her father, once a traffic manager at a grain processing company, spent hours tending vegetables in the backyard. The same ones that later her mother stored in the freezer so they could last during the winter. Together, they filled a small trunk with flowers each day and drove to the local cemetery to decorate the graves.
Over the years, her photographs also included her uncles and other family members. After the birth of Dikeman’s son, he also appears in the images.
Relative Moments was born out of nostalgia and the desire to document the lives of loved ones. However, there is something else hidden inside the images: the intimate detail of an everyday world. In Dikeman’s words, all of them have in common a constant narrative that reflects the American way of life, culture and familiarity.
Routine can become extraordinary through the lens of a camera. It is the magic of freezing time, allowing yourself to stop and observe the details of what we repeat every day. Only then we do realize the intimacy of these moments, which has a lot to do with the place we call home.
You can see Deanna Dikeman’s project here.
