Deanna Dikeman
Deanna Dikeman grew up in the American Midwest. During the past two decades, she has created a prolific body of photographic images that share, with great intimacy, something of that experience with her viewers. Relative Moments, a series she began in 1986, chronicles ordinary moments of her extended family’s activities, capturing the private gestures and smaller truths contained in father’s chores, mother’s orderly home, and grandmother’s kitchen; these are the personal moments that define for each of us a sense of home, security, and belonging. Dikeman’s sharp observation and the quietly receptive lens of her camera serve to capture a visual history of one family’s life, yet the ongoing narrative embedded in this series also conveys larger, more universal truths about American culture.
Dikeman’s work is connected to a rich history of documentary and fine-art photography in its capacity to transform ordinary people and places into iconic and monumental images. In this context, Dikeman’s work can be seen in lineage with Dorothea Lange’s memorable 1936 series of the “Migrant Mother,” published in Life magazine, and the innovative color work by photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. If Life magazine left us with a legacy of belief in the profound power of visual imagery to inform a more inclusive sense of cultural identity as it documented both major news events and everyday moments, then contemporary photographers have continued to mine this tradition and add to it with their own uniquely original visions.
Relative Moments fast-forwards the “fixed” image we have of post–World War II middleclass society and its common-sense values. Dikeman’s images offer insightful commentary on a nostalgic notion of the past, revealing an echo and longing for a simpler, if not more simplistic, time and a generation who grew up as radio listeners gathering together in the living room to learn of world events. But they also contain a layer of more subtle commentary about the mad-dash pace of modern life as it is commonly lived now, focusing on quiet interiors where the conspicuous trappings of high-tech gadgetry and the wear-and-tear effects of consumerism are blissfully absent.
—Raechell Smith
