Deanna Dikeman began photographing her family and surroundings in 1985, after leaving a corporate job to take a photography class. Nearly four decades later, that long-running project has become one of the more quietly persistent bodies of American domestic photography. Relative Moments gathers roughly 200 photographs from the series, published by Chose Commune in 2024 as a 304-page section-sewn hardcover. The book arrives after Leaving and Waving, the 2021 volume that offered only a partial view of the same three-decade undertaking. Where that earlier book concentrated on a single farewell gesture, this one opens the wider archive.
The subject is ordinary life in the American Midwest. Dikeman photographs gardening, cake being cut, a bird bath being filled, clothing mended, the lawn mowed, rhubarb picked. Nothing here is staged as spectacle, and nothing is asked to stand for more than it is. The cumulative effect depends on accumulation rather than on any single picture. Dikeman, born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1954 and now based in Kansas City, has sustained this attention long enough that its subjects age, change, and disappear within the frame. The family record thereby acquires the quality of a visual history, which the publisher links to broader questions of American culture and familiarity.
The editing and sequencing are credited to Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, with design by Poimboeuf-Koizumi in collaboration with Perrine Serre. That editorial labor is central rather than incidental: the publisher describes the sequencing as generous, and the stated aim is that a reader encounters not only the moment in one photograph but the moments that compose a story. In a book of this length, rhythm and juxtaposition carry much of the meaning; the photographs are arranged to be read as a sequence, not consulted as isolated images.
For collectors, the relevant claims are structural rather than promotional. This is a substantial clothbound object at 21.5 by 26 cm, bilingual in French and English, and it presents a far fuller view of a series previously seen only in glimpses. Its significance rests on duration, on the editorial shaping of a large archive, and on the way ordinary domestic gestures are allowed to accumulate into something larger. That is a durable proposition for a shelf of American photography.
