In Santa Barbara, Diana Markosian reconstructs her family’s passage from post-Soviet Moscow to California in the 1990s. The story begins with a classified advertisement placed by her mother, Svetlana, in a Los Angeles newspaper. Her correspondence with a man in Santa Barbara led her to leave Russia with seven-year-old Markosian and the artist’s older brother, pursuing a different future in the United States.
The project takes its title and narrative frame from Santa Barbara, the American soap opera broadcast on Russian television after the Soviet collapse. For Markosian’s family, the program projected an image of Western possibility at a moment of profound uncertainty. The real Californian city thus became inseparable from its televised fiction: both a destination and a screen onto which migration, security, romance, and reinvention could be projected.
Markosian does not present this history as straightforward reportage. Staged scenes, family photographs, archival material, film stills, and images from the original television series are woven into a deliberately hybrid account. She wrote a script with Lynda Myles, one of the soap opera’s original writers, and employed actors to reenact episodes from her family’s past. These shifts between document and performance acknowledge the unstable workings of childhood memory while allowing Markosian to reconsider events from her mother’s perspective, including the sacrifices embedded in her decision to emigrate.
Published by Aperture in 2020, this 216-page volume is Markosian’s debut monograph. Its importance for a photobook collection lies less in a claim to unmediated autobiography than in the precision with which it gives personal history a cinematic and editorial structure. The book brings vernacular family imagery, popular television, reenactment, and contemporary photography into sustained conversation. For collectors attentive to evolving documentary practice, Santa Barbara offers a focused example of how a photobook can examine migration and family mythology while remaining alert to the ways images—and the promises carried by them—shape remembrance.
