In images, in picturesFor nearly three decades, artist Deanna Dikeman photographed her parents in their Iowa home. Reading newspapers, cooking, gardening… their daily rituals have been taken up with delicacy in an attempt to hold back the passage of time.
The choice of black and white was obvious from the outset. In images of her elderly parents, taken at their home in Sioux City, Iowa, American photographer Deanna Dikeman wanted to prevent the red of the exterior walls from overshadowing the sensitivity of intimate moments. Especially since the subject of the photographs of the 66-year-old artist was assumed: it was the banality of gestures and feelings, the flow of tenderness of universal significance.
From 1990 to the death of her mother, in 2017 – her father died in 2009 – Deanna Dikeman took thousands of pictures. First in a private capacity, to ward off the flight of time. During each of her stays, the photographer has set up her tripod in the house. “As soon as I sensed that something interesting was happening, I would take a picture of them. In the long run they got used to it and it was rare that they shied away ”, says Deanna Dikeman, who photographed them “Not as a journalist, but as their daughter”, careful never to annoy them.
Immutable gestures
With infinite delicacy, she immortalized those crumpled faces, before it was too late. She caught the worn but still tender looks, the hunched back, the movements a little slower every day. Far from it, however, the idea of emphasizing the decline of slowed-down retirees or their vulnerability. Rather, it was about documenting their unchanging rituals.
In the neat suburb where his parents lived, the days followed and looked alike. Breakfast is accompanied by reading two newspapers. The father, once a traffic manager at a grain processing company, then waters his lawn and grills burgers in front of his garage, while his mother simmers pies. Contrary to a mocking iconography, overlooking this deep America to point out its cultural confinement or the tendency to hyperconsumption, these commonplaces arouse empathy.
For Deanna Dikeman, this personal album resonates with “broader and more universal truths about American culture”.
For Deanna Dikeman, this personal album resonates with “Wider and More Universal Truths About American Culture”. Her thousands of photos express, according to her, a certain idea of the spirit of the Midwest, this in-between that does not have the fame of the cities of the East Coast or of California. “The Midwest is very ordinary, most people would say it’s boring, she recognizes today, from Kansas City (Missouri), where she has taken up residence. We don’t have the mountains or the ocean on the West Coast, or the century-old trees in national parks. ” There is not much that catches the eye except the immense sky and the earth as far as the eye can see. And that particular spirit – “Practical, down to earth, open and honest, not very refined but solid and good” – whose parents seem to be inhabited.
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