June 7 – 30, 2001
Relative Moments chronicles ordinary moments of my extended family’s activities. I am interested in the significance of the commonplace routine of their lives—the personal moments that define for each of us a sense of home, security, and belonging.
I began by photographing my parents’ home in Iowa. It was a personal documentary effort, commencing when my parents sold my childhood home. They moved, and subsequently I realized that their new house felt like home. So I took pictures of that. My scope expanded as I started taking pictures of my aunts and uncles and their houses and yards. After my son was born, he appeared in the images too.
Although the project started out as nostalgia and documentation, I discovered that the pictures comment on more: a glimpse into an intimate detail of an everyday world that otherwise might go unnoticed. This project captures a visual history of one family’s life, yet I feel 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. Meaning is found in the unremarkable.
Deanna Dikeman was born in Sioux City, Iowa, USA, in 1954. She has been an artist-photographer since 1985, when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She has M.S. and B.S. degrees from Purdue University.
She has photographed her family in Iowa and Nebraska in a body of work called Relative Moments. She has done a series of photographs of interior details of homes, Home Alone in the Middle of the Day. Her Wardrobe project includes photographs of old clothes in thrift stores and a historical costume collection. Other projects are Suburban Photographs, Lost Dog (posters of lost pets), Ballroom (ballroom dancers and their clothing in movement), and Lot Line (looking at the spaces between houses).
Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; The Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedelia, Missouri.
In 2008, she was awarded the United States Artists Booth Fellowship. She received the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship in 1996. Other honors include a 2006 Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship in Kansas City, and the Art Omi International Artists Residency in Ghent, NY. She is represented by Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, Missouri.
Since 1988, Deanna has been included in 155 group and solo shows. Her photographs have been on billboards and outdoor displays as public art projects in Kansas City, Missouri; St. Louis Missouri; and Albany, New York. More recently, her work has been featured in online shows and blogs such as Slate Magazine’s Behold, and Lenscratch. Her self-published book, 27 Good-byes, received Honorable Mention in 2010 Photography Book Now.
