Relative Moments

Following the publication of Leaving and Waving in 2021, which featured an extract from Deanna Dikeman’s work documenting her family over three decades, the original series is presented in a comprehensive 300-page book: Relative Moments.

Deanna Dikeman chronicles ordinary moments spent with her family. Gardening, cutting a cake, filling the bird bath, mending a garment, mowing the lawn or picking rhubarb – it’s through these activities that we discover an everyday life that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this book, which has been generously edited and sequenced – 200 photographs in all – the focus is not just on the moment immortalised in a photograph, but on all the moments that make up the story.

While this project creates a visual archive of the photographer’s family life, it also contains larger, more universal truths about American culture, about the familiar, and about the infinite source of wonder that everyday life provides.