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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