Diana Markosian: Father

Diana Markosian’s Father is an intimate and engrossing diaristic portrayal of estrangement and reconnection, recounted through documentary photographs, family snapshots, text, and visual ephemera. Diana Markosian: Father 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, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), the photographer recreates the story of her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to the US in the 1990s. Father 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?”

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 144
Number of images: 70
Publication date: 2024-11-21
Measurements: 6.5 x 8.6 x 0.75 inches
ISBN: 9781597115896

“Through Markosian’s lens, readers are offered a glimpse, specifically from a daughter’s view, of what this kind of relationship might look like and what it means to rewrite the narrative of a life.”—Vanity Fair

“This intimate exploration includes photographs that mostly render the absences out of frame in a way that is as emotional as it is visual.”—Hyperallergic

“The resulting work is revealing and deeply moving. Its sequence—both image and text—is lyrical, a raw document of both the pain and joy of reconnecting with someone that was once lost.”—It’s Nice That

Diana Markosian (born in Moscow, 1989) is among the leaders of a new generation of photographers and lens-based artists advancing documentary storytelling through image-making. Her photographs have been published in Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the New Yorker. Her work is represented by Galerie les filles du calvaire, Paris. The artist’s acclaimed first monograph, Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020), was selected as one of the top books of the year by Time and the Museum of Modern Art Magazine. She holds an MS from Columbia University in New York.