Diana Markosian captures the bittersweet journey of reuniting with her estranged father

In October 1996, seven-year-old Diana Markosian and her brother David were woken one night. Their mother had packed up their suitcases and booked three one-way tickets to Los Angeles, where they would start a new life with a man she met through a newspaper ad. They left their entire life in Moscow behind – their belongings, friends, and, most crucially, their father.

The photographer, now based in New York, grew up knowing very little about her father. He was in and out of her life – “his visits felt like winning the lottery”, she says. “My parents met young, and their love story was beautiful but fell apart quickly. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did my family, like dominoes,” says Diana. “When my mom decided to leave, she didn’t tell me or my father. She left him a letter, woke me up, and said we were going on a trip. That was the last time I saw him.”

Diana spent the next 15 years searching for her father, and when she eventually did, she discovered that he had been looking for her too. “He had a suitcase full of letters – thousands – all sent to toy stores, embassies, detectives, and even government offices,” she says. Her new book, Father, co-published by Aperture and Atelier EXB, documents their journey of reconciliation. “Reconnecting wasn’t immediate,” she reflects. “It was about building a friendship with a stranger, and grappling with the reality that we couldn’t reclaim those lost years.”

The resulting work is revealing and deeply moving. Its sequence – both image and text – is lyrical, a raw document of both the pain and joy of reconnecting with someone that was once lost. These feelings are revealed through snippets of text by both Diana and her father: “I am searching for the child in her, the one I used to be close to,” one excerpt from her father reads. A series of photographs captures Diana and her father reconnecting at his kitchen table – eating, laughing, playing cards. We also see staged images, as well as old family photos and scans of documents, including the letters that her father wrote to embassies in desperate search of his children.

“Initially, the project was about getting to know my dad and creating memories we never had,” she says. “Producing it was emotionally challenging, especially with the politics of my family because reconnecting with my father meant hurting others.” When they moved to America, it was as though her father never existed. Her mother cut him out of photos, and told her children to forget him. “My upbringing was so jarring,” says Diana. “My father left, then we moved to California, where my mother remarried, only for my stepfather to leave as well. We moved a lot – I attended five schools in my first five years in America,” she says.

When she discovered photography in her late teens, it became a way of creating stability, and “interacting in ways I hadn’t before”, she says. Later on, it also became a way to confront the deepest and darkest parts of herself. Father is a follow-up to Santa Barbara, a photobook, film, and exhibition that re-traced her family’s journey from post–Soviet Russia to California – told through the point of view of her mother. Like this new book, it is bittersweet, painful, beautiful, heartbreaking and enriching – all at once.

At the end of Father, there is an envelope inviting readers to write a letter to the “missing person” in their lives. These letters will eventually be shown in an exhibition. “This book isn’t just about my story. It’s about the universal experience of loss, and the hope that comes with trying to find what was once lost.”