Artist Talks - Diana Markosian

 Diana Markosian Talk – The Photographers’ Gallery

As a part of my professional development planning blog, I was required to attend multiple talks in regard to my studies at galleries in order to gain further insight into my desired area of photography. I decided to attend a talk at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, online, with the photographer Diana Markosian who is a portrait, conceptual and documentary photographer from Moscow whose work focuses on the idea of narrative and storytelling using video and photography. Her work which has been documented in the remotest corners of the world has been showcased in many famous publications such as National Geographic Magazine, The New Yorker and The News York Times. With the course with The Photographers’ Gallery, Diana Markosian showcased two of her most recent and popular projects titled ‘Santa Barbara’ and ‘Mornings with You’.


‘Mornings with You’ is a project based around documentary and portraiture photography focusing on a more personal narrative within her photographs to tell the story of her relationship with an estranged father she did not know as a child growing up and only found him when she was an adult. Within this project she often created photographs focusing on old letters and family photographs from her childhood and of her father before she knew him with the majority of her photographic work within this project being focused on the time that she spent as an adult with her father and how they navigated rebuilding that father-daughter relationship, often over breakfast in the mornings.


Whereas Diana Markosian’s other project, ‘Santa Barbara’ is based around narrative and portraiture photography from the perspective of her mother. For this project, the artist hired actors and actresses to portray her own mother and a younger child version of herself who see then photographed in moments and locations she remembered from her childhood in Moscow, Russia such as the bread lines where she queued in her mother’s arms every morning and within their family home. Within this project she tells the story of her childhood and her experiences within her family life, leaving Russia and her father behind to go with her mother and siblings to live in Santa Barbara which then lead to documenting her experiences growing up in Santa Barbara.


Whilst researching the work of Diana Markosian and attending the online talk at The Photographers’ Gallery I realised a few similarities between her work and my own. A lot of my photographic work is inspired through the themes of storytelling, emotions, and atmospheres through both my experiences in music and concert photography as well as my own editorial photography projects. Attending the talk at The Photographers’ Gallery has given a lot of insight into the way I portray my themes within my own photography and how it can be further developed with my knowledge gained with the work and talk supplied by Diana Markosian.

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