There is nothing obviously exceptional about Deanna Dikeman’s now semi-viral photography series Leaving and Waving (1991-2018). The visual aesthetic of these images of Dikeman’s parents waving goodbye to their daughter over the course of twenty-seven years is familiar and rote. Her parents’ home in Sioux City, Iowa, where they retired after selling Dikeman’s childhood home—and where Dikeman took most of the photographs—is a unit of archetypal suburbia: a one-story house with a small porch, a verdant front lawn and garbage cans posted at the end of the driveway.
Dikeman herself would tell you that the subjects of the image are unexceptional, mired in their normalcy. Her father worked as a traffic manager for a Cargill grain processing plant, coordinating rail and truck shipments of soybeans. Dikeman’s mother was primarily a homemaker but worked a stint as a secretary in a Sioux City warehouse. Neither was a college graduate. In a video call a few days after the series’ Paris Photo debut, Dikeman tells Observer, “They just regarded themselves as kind of ordinary people from Iowa.” Later, she adds that “they had no artifice. They were not worried about how the world saw them.”
But Dikeman didn’t mean for the images of Leaving and Waving or their subjects to be rendered exceptionally. Since the series’ first foray into the art world in 2018, Leaving and Waving has been an ode to Middle America. The photography series finds meaning not in its thematic variance or aesthetic spectacularity but in its ordinary quality… its aesthetic flatness. These photographs feel human.
In them, Dikeman captures nothing more ordinary than time, that indefinite trek that insists on wearing her parents down biologically. And time absolutely thrums in the series of 134 images. The pair are never so animated nor as mobile as in the first photograph, Leaving and waving, 7/1991. In this Kodachrome snapshot, mom in a bright pink top and navy stretch shorts foregrounds the image. Dad is stationed near the porch of their cherry-red house, raising a hand in a more distant goodbye. Eighteen years later, in the monochrome photograph Leaving and waving, 7/2009, the pair are fleshy and close, framed by the car door from which Dikeman takes her photograph. Their wrinkles have deepened, and their arms are held up in more of a shrug than the confident send-off they once gave.
Another eight years later (Leaving and waving, 4/2017), and dad has passed—only mom remains, no longer foregrounding the cherry-red house of her early retirement but tucked away in an assisted living facility. She rocks in a large wooden chair, the walker in front of her a testament to her relative inertness.
The goodbyes are always spirited, though the chronological arc is unstoppable and the end predictable. What could Dikeman do but document? “I knew that someday, I would take the last picture of one of them…I knew where the series was going; I had to finish it,” Dikeman says. “If I never see them again, I will have one last photo of the last moment I saw them wave goodbye to me. I know if I never see them again, I will love having that photo.”
And though Dikeman knew the end was coming—and let her images speak to that inevitability—the last photo in the series is no less heartrending. In the final photograph, appropriately named Leaving, 10/2017, we see a cherry-red house. The garage door is closed. There are no trashcans on the front lawn; there is no need for them. The driveway is empty. Dikeman captured the image shortly after her mother’s death.
In Leaving and Waving, Dikeman documents the most ordinary places and processes, aware that we often neglect the most quotidian times and places in their respective moments. Virginia Woolf wrote that we don’t understand or fully “realize” an emotion until after a moment ends. Dikeman offers a reversal of this philosophy: she asks us to always truly see and chronicle the cherry-red houses of our youth, our homes and our sanctuaries, no matter their aesthetic value. A reminder to record the world before there is nothing left to do but leave it.
