One photographer’s search for her long lost father

Born in Moscow in 1989 to Armenian parents, photographer Diana Markosian’s earliest years were rocked by the collapse of empire. The fall of the Berlin Wall that same year signalled that the Iron Curtain had finally come down, and by 1991, the Soviet Union would dissolve. Markosian’s parents, both PhDs, could not find work and the crippling stress of poverty on the young family drove their marriage apart. 

In 1996, Markosian’s mother brought her daughter and son to Santa Barbara to begin life anew in Southern California. As a young girl, Markosian did not understand what was going on. ​“We came to America when I was seven, and one of my first questions was: ​“When is papa going to come?” she remembers. 

The answer never came. Instead, the question became taboo. ​“When I would ask her over the years, she would just tell me to forget him, that he wasn’t coming back, and eventually she just said: ​‘You know, he made his decisions, and we’re making ours,’” Markosian says. 

But Markosian never gave up searching for the man she barely knew, his face carefully cut from many of the photographs brought over from Russia. His memory became a spectre – the presence of absence that weighed heavily on her soul, while she searched the faces of strangers passing on the street, hoping one day that he might appear.

In 2013, Markosian, then 24, and her brother travelled to Moscow and then Armenia, determined to find him – only to do just that. ​“I didn’t recognise him. He didn’t recognise me,” Markosian remembers of the first time they met. She spoke freely, telling him what she had gleaned from her mother over the years: they had been abandoned for another woman. But none of that was true, and suddenly she was faced with having to unlearn everything she had come to believe about a man she never really knew.

Read next: Building bridges to the past with survivors of the Armenian Genocide

With Father, the new book and exhibition, Markosian crafts a heartrending story of grief, love, and loss – of wounds that time can never heal but instead are carried within as a kind of alchemy. Seamlessly weaving portrait, interior, still life, family photos, candy-coloured stills from home movies, personal correspondence, and official documents of her father’s fruitless search for his children over the years, Father is a complicated portrait of a man who is both memory and flesh bound in the complex archetype of fatherhood.

Now 35, Markosian is the same age as her parents when they split and has come to a deeper understanding of the choices her mother made. To be with her father, she had to let go of everything she had been taught to believe – a reckoning that was hers and no one else’s to bear. And in doing so, a connection was born.

“The other day he said to me: ​‘There’s two types of people – people who are full and people who are empty,’” Markosian says. ​“He always told me: ​‘You’re a full person,’ and that’s the thing I noticed about him, this very content nature of being comfortable in his own skin. He was the family photographer, so all the Super 8 films that we had were made by him. They’re beautiful. He’s an artist.”

Diana Markosian: Father is on view at Foam in Amsterdam March 7 – May 28, 2025. The book is published by Aperture.

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