Category: family

This book presents 27 years of Deanna Dikeman photographing her parents waving goodbye as she left their home after a visit. Just as she was driving away, Dikeman invariably pointed her camera at her parents. What started with a candid snapshot in 1991 turned into a ritual over the years. The book chronicles their farewells as seasons change and years go by, separating black and white photographs from colour photographs. Leaving and Waving — which was originally part of a larger body of work entitled Relative Moments — is a heartfelt exploration of family, the passage of time and the sadness of leaving.

Issei Suda compulsively documents, with a great sense of humour, the daily life he shared with his daughter, wife, and dog.

Between 1991 and 1992, Issei Suda shot compulsively with a Minox camera, which is one of the smallest cameras there is. It is actually so small that it was commonly used for intelligence activities during the war. Issei Suda turned his lens towards the intimacy of his own home, documenting with a great sense of humour the daily life he shared with his daughter, wife and dog. The photographs presented in this book « Family Diary » — a title that Suda chose himself in the 1990s —, have never been published in book form before.

This print is part of a series of 5 prints by women photographers that we have previously published: Deanna Dikeman, Clémentine Schneidermann, Moe Suzuki, Irina Rozovsky and Mikiko Hara.

In Deanna Dikeman’s family album, ordinary moments embody universal truths and become a source of daily wonder.

After publishing Leaving and Waving in 2021, which presented only a glimpse of Deanna’s Dikeman’s 3-decade journey to document her family, Chose Commune is proud to introduce the photographer’s larger series in an exhaustive 300-page book: Relative Moments.

In Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman chronicles ordinary moments of her family’s activities. From gardening to cutting cake, from filling up the bird bath to mending a piece of clothing, from mowing the lawn to picking rhubarb, one gets to discover an everyday that might otherwise go unnoticed. In this book, which was generously edited and sequenced — 200 photographs in total — one is not only meant to see the moment shot in one photograph, but all the moments that compose the story. 

This project captures a visual history of the photographer family’s life, yet, there is an ongoing narrative embedded in these photographs that conveys larger, more universal truths about American culture, familiarity, and the endless source of everyday wonder that surrounds us.

A multigenerational family story centered on the limited relationship between a bereaved son and his long-deceased mother—who died in a plane crash—as well as that same son’s new life as a husband and father. This nonlinear, narrative-driven book charts an artist’s journey through alternating currents of grief, pleasure, love, and heartache, suggesting how the past is ever-present.

As an elegy contextualized within a decades deep family archive, Son Pictures combines Trent Davis Bailey’s own photography and writing from the past decade with premonitory drawings and paintings made by his mother in the 1960s and ‘70s; family snapshots from the 1980s, ‘90s, and 2020s; gritty photojournalism from 1989 repurposed from a newspaper’s archive in Iowa; and film stills sourced from two Hollywood movies set in Iowa that—along with camcorder footage from a home video—the artist rephotographed on a 1990s tube television.

Initially seeking to memorialize and somehow reconcile with the tragic death of his mother in the crash landing of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa in 1989, Bailey’s intent for this work shifted greatly when thirty years later, in 2019, he himself became a father. The result is an emotionally wrought and yet still fraught compilation that oversteps the standardized and staid conventions of family photo albums and slideshows. For the artist, this book is “a photographic memorial and an atlas of memory,” one that has allowed him to grapple with the residue of having been thrust into the global media spotlight at a very young age and designated—along with his brothers (who survived the crash) and his father—as a subject in survivor stories. By culling a variety of imagery created before, during, and after the crash, Son Pictures looks into the motherless chasm of an American household and conveys its outgrowths and shards of grief and trauma with a necessary heavy heartedness, but also with humor and hope.

For Bailey, it’s important this intensely personal body of work blurs lines of authorship. The result is one that processes the artist’s painful early years and his more recent evolution as a father, while at the same time questioning the associative relationship between truth and photography, the interchange between images and memory, and the ethics of representation in both Hollywood and photojournalism. Put simply, this book is a discursive time warp and a reminder that behind every tragic news event there are people whose lives are forever impacted.