Diana Markosian: Father

<p><b>Diana Markosian’s <i>Father</i> is an intimate and engrossing diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection, recounted through documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera.</b></p><p><b><br></b></p><p><i>Diana Markosian: Father </i>presents the photographer’s journey to another place and another time, where Markosian attempts to piece together an image of a familiar stranger—her long-lost father. The book explores her father’s absence, her reconciliation with him, and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement. The images, made over the course of a decade, take place in her father’s home in Armenia. In Markosian’s first monograph, <i>Santa Barbara</i> (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. <i>Father</i> uses both documentary photographs and archives of objects, letters, and vernacular images to probe the fifteen years of absence and separation from the photographer’s childhood. In this voyage of self-discovery, Markosian touchingly renders her longing for connection to a man she barely remembers and who asks her, when she finds him, “Why did it take you so long?”</p>