Diana Markosian，美籍亞美尼亞人，紀實攝影師、作家兼電影制片人，2016年馬格南圖片社新提名成員。現(xiàn)代攝影并不依賴于單幅照片的表現(xiàn)力，更強調(diào)通過一組照片來表達自己。Diana Markosian的這組照片將歷史、個人經(jīng)驗結(jié)合起來，將歷史照片、物品、個人照片相結(jié)合，是一個如何用攝影講故事的絕佳范例。這組照片結(jié)合作者的文字，有更打動人心的力量。
For most of my life, my father was nothing more than a cut out in our family album.
An empty hole.
A reminder of what wasn't there.
I have few childhood memories of him.
In one, we are dancing together in our tiny apartment in Moscow. In another, he is leaving.
My father would disappear for months at a time. Then, unexpectedly, he would come home.
Until, one day, it was our turn to leave.
The year was 1996.
My mother woke me up and told me to pack my belongings. She said we were going on a trip, and the next morning we arrived in our new home, in California.
We never said goodbye to my father.
For my mom, the solution to forget him was simple. She cut his image out of every photograph in our family album. But those holes made it harder for me to forget him.
I often wondered what it would have been like to have a father.
I still do.
When I was a child, my father would visit my brother and me, floating in and out of our lives.
Today, the visitor is me.
I am standing in the courtyard of his home.
It's the same gray, decaying Soviet building I remember as a child.
You could say I've come home. But that's not how it feels.
I was seven years old when I last saw him.
The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then so had my family.
We became desperate overnight: running from landlords and searching for bottles in exchange for food.
I don't remember much about my father then.
When I would ask my mother about him, she would look at me disappointed.
"Forget him. He's gone," she'd say.
My mother never understood why I wanted to know him.
I don't think she does to this day.
I eventually stopped thinking about him.
I stopped listening to the stories told by my mother of the man who destroyed our family.
Instead, I invented my own father: he was the man who always wanted to be next to me, but died when I was seven.
It was easier than trying to understand why he was not there.
It has been 15 years since we've seen each other.
All these year later, I found my father standing just how I left him.
In a doorway, neither fully in or out of my life.
He showed me inside.
His home resembled a museum, the walls covered with my grandfather's oil paintings and family pictures.
He had changed almost nothing inside. He had not added any furniture; he had not removed any furniture -- even my brother's childhood toys were there, stored in an attic closet.
It felt familiar at first, even reassuring.
I listened to him speak about the past and his feelings towards my mother.
My parents met in university in Armenia.
My mother had just turned 21.
It's strange to look at images of them together.
They look so happy, so in love.
All I ever knew was my mother’s disappointment towards him.
He said he had been looking for me.
He opened a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings, undelivered letters and a shirt for my brother's wedding.
Items my grandfather put aside in hopes of meeting us one day.
In the classified section of a local newspaper my grandfather wrote:
"My grandchildren are missing. They lived in Moscow with their mother who took them overseas. Anyone with information, please help me find them."
For 15 years, my grandfather would trawl the newspapers in search of addresses to mail letters.
Hundreds of them, sent to homes in America.
None made it to our doorstep.
One of the only images of my father and I together.
I saw it for the first time when I was 23.
But that was the past.
The man standing across from me didn't recognize me. I didn't recognize him either.
I felt out of place.
A part of me wanted to get to know him.
We started to take photos of each other, the space between us, as a way of working through that void.
My father started to take pictures of me as well.
He wrote messages on his images to express things he couldn't say otherwise.
"Time has flown between us," writes my father "My consciousness is split as I try to bring together the image of my little girl and my grown daughter today."
"There is a constant feeling of lost time between us, an enormous pain that can always be felt."
"I am searching for the little girl in her, the little girl I used to know, the one I was once close to. In myself, I am searching for the feelings I once felt for her."
Not too long ago, my father had another child, a little girl.
I should be happy for him, but when I watch him play with his daughter, it feels like a bruise someone keeps pressing.
I can't help but wonder why she gets to have a father and I don't.
Even now.
There are moments when he seems to have changed, to have opened up a little.
One night he shares his poetry with me. Another time he surprises me with tickets to the symphony and sneaks in chocolates for us. We eat them in the dark.
But then, all at once, he is not there, as if those moments had never even existed.
He isn't the only one who is distant.
I often don't know how to behave around my father.
Sometimes he watches me brush my hair or reaches to embrace me. When he does, I pull away.
I still don't know what he is to me or what I am to him.
His writing told me what he couldn't otherwise.
There's pain there that I understand.
A longing for more.
That is something we share.
When I look at him, I see so much of myself.
His desire to be alone and his need to create.
I keep looking for him.
I think I always will.
