Some photo projects are organic, made for personal memory keeping or a desire to document familial events, large and small. I have been a long time friend and fan of Deanna Dikeman and have so enjoyed the decades long documentation of her family doing ord
Some photo projects are organic, made for personal memory keeping or a desire to document familial events, large and small. I have been a long time friend and fan of Deanna Dikeman and have so enjoyed the decades long documentation of her family doing ordinary things, living ordinary lives, resulting in an extraordinary body of work that speaks to time, memory, and routine. One of those routines that Dikeman captured each time she said her goodbyes was to photograph her parents waving to her as she departed. This simple gesture seems unremarkable as a singular event, but when you gather 27 years of goodbyes, the work is poignant and profoundly meaningful. Starting in 1991, she has chronicled this simple and heartfelt gesture, with a history that comes to a inevitable end. Though personal, this project has a universal appeal that speaks to familial love and the quiet gestures that bond us together.
Deanna Dikeman’s portrait series doubles as a family album, compressing nearly three decades of her parents’ adieux into a deft and affecting chronology.
Deanna Dikeman’s parents sold her childhood home, in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1990, when they were in their early seventies. They moved to a bright-red ranch house in the same town, which they filled with all their old furniture. Dikeman, a photographer then in her thirties, spent many visits documenting the idyll of their retirement. Her father, once a traffic manager at a grain-processing corporation, tended to tomato plants in the backyard. Her mother fried chicken and baked rhubarb pie, storing fresh vegetables in the freezer to last them through the cold. Every Memorial Day, they stuffed the trunk of their blue Buick with flowers and drove to the local cemetery to decorate graves.
