Relative Moments

In the traveling photography exhibition Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman presents a deeply personal chronicle of her Midwestern family—her parents, her son Theron, and a close circle of aunts and uncles—traced across more than three decades.

Featuring over 100 photographs, the exhibition unfolds as a sustained meditation on time, devotion, and the quiet rituals that bind generations together.

Grounded in everyday experience, the work connects with audiences through familiar moments of caregiving, aging, and family life. These scenes feel both specific and recognizable, inviting personal reflection and conversations across generations.

Everyday Life, Care, and Connection
The photographs focus on the small, steady rhythms that shape family life. Dikeman records the chores that maintain a home—washing dishes, tending gardens, mowing lawns—alongside intimate exchanges that give those spaces meaning. We see moments of celebration and tenderness unfold naturally: sharing dessert at the kitchen table, a grandfather crouching in the dirt to find an earthworm for his grandson, decorating what might be a final Christmas tree, or scattering birdseed on a snowy roof for Santa’s reindeer.

These gestures, at once ordinary and profound, reveal how love is embedded in daily acts of care and patience. Seen together, the exhibition unfolds like the pages of a family album, and for many audiences, they feel deeply familiar, making the exhibition particularly rich for community engagement and public programs.

Photographic Approach and Artistic Practice
Dikeman often positions herself in the work as a quiet observer. Her family rarely acknowledges the camera, remaining absorbed in their routines and relationships. This unobtrusive approach lends the images an unguarded authenticity, allowing viewers to feel as though they are witnessing lived experience rather than posed portraits.

The modest scale of the prints enhances their personal quality, encouraging viewers to lean in and look closer. Visitors are drawn into the images not only through what is visible, but through what is sensed and remembered—the smell of a favorite meal cooking, the stillness of sitting in a lawn chair on a warm afternoon, the steady rhythm of seasonal tasks repeated year after year.

Serial Narrative and the Passage of Time
A defining thread within the exhibition is the Leaving and Waving series, a sequence of farewell photographs made at the end of each visit with Dikeman’s parents. Repeated over decades, these images form a subtle yet powerful chronology.

The house remains constant, while expressions, postures, and circumstances gradually shift. Smiles soften, a child enters the frame, and eventually the farewell is offered by only one parent. Through this serial structure, small changes accumulate into a deeply affecting meditation on aging, continuity, and loss—an experience that often resonates strongly with audiences navigating similar life transitions.