There is nothing obviously different about Deanna Dikeman's now semi-viral photo series He walked and waved (1991-2018). The visual beauty of these pictures of Dikeman's parents waving goodbye to their daughter in her mid-twenties is familiar and familiar. His parents' home in Sioux City, Iowa, where they retired after selling Dikeman's childhood home—and where Dikeman took many photos—is the epitome of archetypal suburbia: a one-story house with a small porch, a green front lawn, and a lawn. which is green. trash cans are placed at the end of the street.
Dikeman himself will tell you that the subjects of the picture are not unique, they are focused on their general situation. His father worked as a traffic manager at the Cargill grain mill, coordinating shipments of soybeans and trucks. Dikeman's mother was a homemaker but worked as a secretary at a warehouse in Sioux City. Neither had graduated from college. In a video call a few days after the start of the Paris Photo series, Dikeman tells the Observer, “They just saw themselves as kind of normal Iowans.” Later, he adds that “they had no creativity. They weren't worried about how the world saw them.”
But Dikeman didn't mean pictures of He walked and waved or their subjects should be specially given. Since this series first entered the art world in 2018, He walked and waved it was the way to Middle America. A series of photographs finds meaning not in its diversity of themes or aesthetic views but in its common quality… its aesthetic flatness. These images feel human.
In them, Dikeman captures nothing more mundane than time, that endless journey that insists on degrading his biological parents. And time passes perfectly in a series of 134 images. These couples are never animated or moved like in the first picture, Walking and Walking, 7/1991. In this Kodachrome snapshot, a mother in a pink top and stretchy beach shorts is in the foreground. My father is standing by the porch of their red house, waving goodbye from afar. Eighteen years later, in a monochrome photograph It goes and goes, 7/2009the two are physical and intimate, framed by the car door that Dikeman photographed her in. Their wrinkles have deepened, and their arms are raised beyond the trembling confidence they once gave.
Another eight years later (It goes and goes, 4/2017), and the father is dead – only the mother is left, she no longer shows the red house of early retirement but is kept in an assisted living facility. He sways in a large wooden chair, the person walking in front of him is evidence of his relative entrance.
Farewell is always windy, although the chronological arc is unstoppable and the ending is predictable. What can Dikeman do without writing? “I knew that one day, I would take the last picture of one of them…I knew where the series was going; I had to finish,” said Dikeman. “If I don't see them again, I will have the last picture of the last time I saw them saying goodbye to me. I know if I ever see them again, I will love to have that picture.”
And even though Dikeman knows the end is coming—and lets his photos speak to that inevitability—the final image in the series is heartbreaking. In the last picture, aptly named Going, 10/2017we see a cherry red house. The garage door is closed. No trashcans on the front lawn; there is no need for them. The input method is empty. Dikeman took this photo shortly after his mother's death.
In He walked and wavedDikeman writes about places and processes that are very familiar, knowing that we often ignore quotidian times and places in their time. Virginia Woolf wrote that we do not fully understand or “see” an emotion until a moment has passed. Dikeman offers a modification of this philosophy: he asks us to always see and write history about the red houses of our youth, our homes and our sanctuaries, regardless of their aesthetic value. A reminder to carve up the world before there is anything you can do without leaving it.
