Dad is cooking steaks on the barbecue grill while Mom is checking the progress. We are in the backyard patio of their house.

Everything in this book reminds me of my upbringing in the Midwest. It feels so painfully familiar. When I mention pain in my assessment, it is because some of this experience gnaws at me and upends the chapters of my life that I have found hard to celebrate or close. I am woefully disobedient to closure, but I am honest with myself. The reason that Deanna’s work is so affecting is that I have had similar relationships with people in my life that I project onto her work. I want some of it back, but I realize the very unnerving trip chord involved in trying to find myself at peace through my memories surrogated through the eyes of someone else. Time has passed. I have trouble going home, even in my memories. It is not Deanna’s position to her parents that evokes these memories, but instead, it is her child in the photographs and their relationship to the people involved.

Growing up in the Midwest, my mom and I were close to her parents after my second year. The first two years, born out of wedlock and with no father in sight, left my mother with an emotional and familial deficit based on my grandfather’s inability of not see the bigger picture. My mom and I were essentially abandoned by her family in those first years. I am reminded of my grandfather’s alcoholism, a product of what I suspect was his time in the Philippines during WWII, and the loving but mouselike quiet of my grandmother that kept relations frozen during those years. I think of my mom in her mid-twenties, banished from the family when she needed them the most, and the redundant nature of a particular type of fixed Catholicism. It would not surprise me if, at the root of this, a definition of my character, misdeeds, and fortunes prevailed because of these early years. Bear with me; oversharing is one of my traits.

Aunt Evey, Uncle Earl, and I sat outside on a warm May day.

I am reminded of these things because of the beauty I see in Deanna’s book, the charm and luster of a cohesive family environment, and in this, I reroute my emotional compass. I am reminded of the better moments, smells, sounds, and the home as something I can still appreciate, as not all was the smell of brandy and an awkward silence. In fact, after those first years, the stumbling years, things began to look up, and some relative objects and scenarios in Deanna’s new book reminded me of better times growing up in the Midwest. The book also reminds me of time and how little of it there is to make the right relationships and to see the value of things in front of you as they tediously pass closer to the finite. There is a time for closure, and though it may not percolate during life, books like Deanna’s help to find a surrogate peace, a channel for which to lament with eyes open. For this, I am indebted to her.

Mom liked to do mending and took pride in fixing something.

In relating to the images in Relative Moments and Deanna’s incredible previous book, Leaving and Waving, both published by French publisher Chose Commune, I am given a second chance at my relationship with family through an act of downloading Deanna’s memories, or at least, her photographs that present as memories. Particular Midwestern suburban artifacts attract a strong Proustian memory when I look at her pictures. The lighter fluid for the BBQ, the carpet, the smell of lemon Pledge, and a vague hint of mothballs-Ever smelt mothballs? How did you get their tiny legs apart?

All sorts of memories tumble down from the folded recesses of my brain, inspiring and causing what can only be thought of as a nervous acceptance. It is both loving and makes me insecure. I think of her child playing in the snow helping Grandpa with the driveway as a vague form of deja vu. I smile and wait for the deer to arrive to be hung from the basketball hoop before it is dressed (a funny term given how much undressing occurs). This latent humility in my thoughts strikes a chord in me as I relate to the boy in the pictures and those experiences I can only assume he also had with his mom and grandparents in his formative years. Does he remember staying in the house, something familiar and not quite home? Does he remember those glass jars under the shelves in the garage holding screws, bolts, and the like? What do you think about the sundial in the yard and its improbable use? What overlap might we share of these memories, smells, and the like?

Theron uses the Weedeater to edge the grass by the curb while Dad mows.

It is for this reason and the reasons for the loss in my own life that Deanna’s work strikes a pervasive nerve in me. I remember my experience of pawing through Leaving and Waving and feeling a bit choked up as in my young adult years; I remember those gestures. I remember the Midwest rituals of walking one out to the car after half an hour (minimum) of talking about it, finding comfort, and, of course, the sadness associated with those that have gone on. Mom, Grandma, Aunt Vicky, Grandpa, all within a decade, 75% of those within half that. Longing and exorcisms are strange bedfellows.

In reading Deanna’s book, some of my family come back and say hello from the rim of the fishbowl of life I inhabit. They are not clear; they waver, yet they present as comforting, and this is primarily unlocked from Relative Moments, a tome that is more like a grimoire for conjuring a rapport with those who have left. I do not know as I type this whether the point of how unique Deanna’s books are to me is evident, nor will they have the same effect on everyone. You do not have to be from the Midwest to understand them, but it helps. I deeply admire Deanna and Chose Commune for putting these books out. Apart from Seiichi Furuya and Larry Sultan’s books, very few others have this intense ability to make me emote, and I hope that gives the reader a clear indicator of their importance.

Deanna Dikeman

Relative Moments

Chose Commune