Deanna Dikeman

Leaving and Waving

For twenty-seven years, I took photographs as I waved good-bye and drove away with my car from visiting my parents at their home in Sioux City, Iowa. I started in 1991 with a snapshot, and I continued taking photographs with each departure. I never set out to make this series. I just took these photographs to deal with the sadness of leaving. It gradually turned into our good-bye ritual and it seemed natural for me to keep the camera busy because I had been taking pictures every day while I was there.

These photographs are part of a larger body of work I call ‘Relative Moments’, with which I have chronicled the lives of my parents and other relatives since 1986. So when I discovered the ‘Leaving and Waving’ images that, in the meantime, had accumulated, I found a story about family, aging, and the sorrow of saying good-bye.

In a photograph from 2009, my father was no longer there: he passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me while I was leaving. Her face became more forlorn with my departures. In 2017 my mother had to move to assisted living. I continued to photograph the good-byes from her apartment door for a few months. In October of 2017, she also passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.

Deanna Dikeman (Sioux City, Iowa, 1954) is a photographer who resides in Kansas City, Missouri. She had been photographing her midwestern family and surroundings since 1985 when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She has a master’s and a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University, Indiana. She received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship in 1996 and the United States Artist Booth Mattsson Fellowship in 2008. 

‘A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell' was one of the top twenty-five stories of 2020 in the American magazine The New Yorker. Her book 'Leaving and Waving’ was published by the French publishing house Chose Commune in March 2021, after being short-listed for the MACK First Book Award 2020.