Meeting with Diana Markosian

Following on from Santa Barbara, Father is the second opus devoted to Diana Markosian’s family history. In this work, the photographer offers us an intimate and captivating narrative around the themes of estrangement and reconnection, mixing documentary photographs, family snapshots, texts and period documents. Diana Markosian attempts to reconstruct the image of a familiar stranger, her father, who disappeared from her life when she was seven. The book explores his absence, his search for her and their reconciliation, almost twenty years later when she reunites with him in Armenia, as well as the shared emptiness of their long separation.

This publication accompanies the traveling exhibition “Father”, which opens at London’s National Portrait Gallery (November 2024 – March 2025) and travels to FOAM, Amsterdam, in March 2025.

Diana Markosian was born in Moscow in 1989 and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York. She is one of the leaders of a new generation of photographers who are seizing on images in all their forms to move the lines of documentary storytelling. By combining different styles and media, she has developed a unique approach to photographic storytelling. Diana Markosian’s photographs have been published in Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker.
Her work is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris.

Daphné Anglès is a journalist and editor for The New York Times in Paris. She was secretary of the jury for the annual World Press Photo award. She has taught photography editing workshops, curated photography exhibitions and participated in documentary photography juries. She is passionate about how photography can record our history, our lives and who we are.