When she was only 7 years old, Diana Markosian left post-Soviet Russia, where she was born. A departure orchestrated in the middle of the night by her mother, heading toward the United States. She and her brother left everything behind: their familiar world and their father. A sudden farewell that cemented a rupture between her parents that had already taken place. In family photos, his silhouette is cut out, and his existence becomes a complete mystery. They grow up in California, in a world that feels surreal to them—an experience the photographer stages in Santa Barbara, a visual production exploring her personal story.
It is only 15 years later that she begins the search for the man who exists only in her memory. With no name or address, she eventually finds him in her grandparents’ house in Armenia. There, time seems to have stood still—the settings remain the same, the world has not moved on. Over the next decade, she undertakes several trips to reconnect with this father who has become a stranger to her—journeys she carefully documents, which together form Father.
“It’s hard for me to consider these two series as projects, because they are more like journeys helping me to understand my past and both of my parents. If I had to distinguish the two, I’d say Father is a story that took me ten years to write. Though it takes a documentary form, it’s primarily about building a relationship with someone, while Santa Barbara was more of a production, a mystery to solve,” explains Diana Markosian.
While for the first series, the artist surrounds herself with a full team and actors to play family members, the second is more minimalistic, more visceral. “It’s simply me, finding my father and trying to make sense of the feeling of loss born from all the time we didn’t spend together,” she says.
The Emotion of Reunion
Favoring black and white, Diana Markosian layers her work, playing with mediums to bring out the emotion. Archives, drawings, videos, and keepsakes feed the portraits she captures—the soul of the place her father inhabits and their shared fears about the emotional impact of their reunion. “He told me he had looked for me. He opened a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings, unsent letters, and a shirt for my brother’s wedding—things my grandfather had kept just in case he ever found us… But that was the past. The man in front of me didn’t recognize me. I didn’t recognize him either. I didn’t feel like I belonged,” writes Diana Markosian.
Both tender and heartbreaking, Father reads like a cry from the heart—a nearly desperate attempt to build something out of nothing. “I explore themes of grief, reconnection, hope—it’s about our ability to understand the things we can’t change,” adds the photographer.
First previewed at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the exhibition now unfolds at Foam across four rooms—visual representations of the protagonists’ emotional states and of the home so often fantasized about. The first space is dedicated to the figure of the father, to his story. “To what it feels like to meet a stranger,” the artist adds.
The second focuses on the children’s search, leading to their reunion in the third space, and to the relationship they attempt to build. “The final room brings us into the present,” continues Diana Markosian. A collaborative space where she’s created a dialogue with visitors: anyone can, if they wish, share their own stories of loss and reunion by writing notes and posting them in a Soviet-era mailbox mounted on the wall. An immersive design that underlines the sensitivity of the subject—a theme the photographer will further develop in an exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2025.
Diana Markosian’s exhibition “Father” is on view at Foam until May 28, 2025. An eponymous book is available from Aperture for $50 or Atelier EXB for €45.
