In her unusual photography cycle “Leaving and Waving”, Deanna Dikeman takes on a dual role: a daughter-Deanna, and a photographer-Deanna. The essence of Deanna Dikeman’s photo cycle “Leaving and Waving” is actually the transition and time. It is fascinating how just by placing all her photos from this cycle, one after another, at one place, we travel through time, and her life.

The exhibition “Deanna Dikeman – Leaving and Waving” opens to the public on Monday, June 9, 2025, at 7 PM at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Zelenih beretki 8, 71000 Sarajevo).

About the Exhibition

The camera in Deanna Dikeman’s process of photographing is the main object that separates the daughter Deanna from the photographer Deanna in her work. Even though she portrays her parents in front of their house whenever she leaves, her professionalism as a photographer is shown in allowing herself to keep a distance, or rather to say: to hide herself behind her camera, in not only objectifying two figures as a documentation of their life, or part of her life, but actually telling a story of her life in the most simple photographic way.

A simple order of pictures, one after another, with simply mentioned dates of the photos when they were taken, organized like a film, brings us to different days and separate visits through 27 years of Deanna’s life.

The book by Deanna Dikeman is even more interesting, because it is almost like a film (a photography film), just constructed into spreads, which allows us to read the whole story only by turning the pages of the book and looking at the pictures. It is life in its visual form that passes in front of our eyes.

The importance of Deanna’s photo-cycle is not only shown in telling a story in the most simple way a photographer could tell it, but also in choosing some ‘ordinary people’ who could be the ones who are telling something. More importantly, the ‘ordinary’ ones were the most important ones to her. This shows her talent to describe the story of the ‘ordinary’, or the middle-class, as valuable, and to differentiate herself as a photographer onto the art scene.

At the time when she started taking up photography, as a hobby, unlike her peers and then-current photographers who were looking for extreme scenes within ‘extreme’ America, Deanna decided to photograph what was close to her, familiar, what she knew best – her parents.

Although the camera that she uses could help Deanna in creating a kind of protective shield or barrier while playing or transitioning between the roles of daughter-Deanna and photographer-Deanna, during the process she strives to make a simple photographic language more humane. Related to this year’s theme of the fourth edition of Sarajevo Photography Festival – Weltschmerz, Deanna’s work reminds us how a photographer, a real professional, even though they couldn’t do anything in stopping the death, they can always do what a photographer has to do – to grab a camera and take a picture.

– Armin Ćosić, exhibition designer –

About the Author

Deanna Dikeman (b. 1954, Sioux City, Iowa, USA) currently resides in Kansas City, USA. She graduated from Purdue University. She has photographed her midwestern family and surroundings since 1985, when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996, and the United States Artists Booth Fellowship in 2008. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Since 1988, Deanna has had 24 solo shows and has been included in over 160 group shows. The New Yorker’s article “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” was one of the top 25 stories of 2020 in that magazine. Her work has also been published in Buzzfeed News JPG, Country Living, D la Repubblica, DUMMY, GEO, GUP, Harpers Magazine, M Le magazine du Monde, TAZ Berlin, Der Tagesspiegel Sonntag, The New York Times, Réponses Photo, De Volkskrant Observatorium, and VOSTOK, among others. She has two photobooks published by Chose Commune: ‘Leaving and Waving’ (2021) and ‘Relative Moments’ (2024). Her photo-cycle ‘Leaving and Waving’ received the 2021 Prix Nadar awarded by the Association Gens d’Images in France, the book was a finalist for the 2021 Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award and the photographs from this series have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries in thirteen countries worldwide.