At the Polygon Gallery, Leaving and Waving chronicles 27 years of parents saying goodbye in the driveway
Deanna Dikeman’s deeply affecting photo exhibit speaks to mortality and the importance of familial bonds
The first shot in Deanna Dikeman’s Leaving and Waving series, 1991.
The Polygon Gallery presents Leaving and Waving until April 2
AT DEANNA DIKEMAN’S PROFOUNDLY moving new exhibit Leaving and Waving, a row of 100 photographs sits along a long shelf—and it’s the inescapable reality of where they lead that gets you right where it hurts the most.
Arranged chronologically, they capture the American photographer’s retired parents waving goodbye to their daughter from the front driveway of the family’s red bungalow in Sioux City over 27 years. Through colour and black-and-white images, we witness the proud parents age: canes emerge, heights shrink, and smiles weather with time. Eventually, only one stands to carry out the ritual.
The final image, of a house now standing alone with its driveway empty, is quietly devastating.
For Dikeman, who took the first shot in 1991 just before she backed her car out to return to her home in Missouri, documenting the tradition became, in part, a way for her to cope with the pain of goodbyes.
“The action of pushing the button made it easier to leave,” she tells Stir at the Polygon Gallery, where the exhibit opened last week. “I had a piece of them in the camera. Even if I couldn't live near to them, I could at least take their photo. We were all sad I was leaving. So we all smiled for a minute. And that made me feel better.”
Leaving and Waving grew out of a larger body of work, called Relative Moments, documenting her parents’ day-to-day lives. The first image, shot spontaneously through her windshield on Kodachrome, sat in a box of slides for a few years until she started chronicling her departures more consistently in the mid-1990s. Moved when she realized that she had caught displays of love and loyalty that would not always be there for her, Dikeman began shooting every single goodbye wave as she backed out of the driveway—on sunny days when the lawn was emerald green, on winter days when the snow was piled high.
“I was very close to my parents,” she explains. “I hadn’t lived at home since high school, so it was always a big deal when I came home.”
While modest in their snapshot feel, Dikeman’s photographs speak to much bigger themes of mortality and time. It’s the tiny details in them that make the images so universally affecting. Many of us who fled the suburbs when we transitioned into adulthood have seen our own mother and father waving in the same way on the driveway. There are details that define her parents’ generation: Dikeman points out that her dad, who grew up in the Depression, is wearing the same, practical winter coat over a span of 20 years; in others, he wears a Purina checkered hat someone gave him. In the colour photos, her mother is inclined toward cheery pinks and blues.
“They were active: they mowed the lawn, they shovelled the snow,” Dikeman recalls. “I felt there was something about these two people living their quiet lives in Iowa that gets kind of ignored. A lot of big ‘important’ things get photographed. I just wanted to show ordinary nondescript people in the middle of Iowa. There was as much value in their lives as there was in anyone’s. And I’ve been really gratified that I get to show them.”
What comes across strongly is the parents’ unshowy affection for their daughter, and each other.
“The look in my dad’s eyes!” the photo artist remarks, looking at a section of images from the late 1990s. “He was the one who always had the camera and he was the one who got me interested in photography. He’s so patient. I think he understood my need to take a picture in a way that my mom didn’t.”
As gallerygoers walk the timeline of photographs, they glimpse Dikeman’s life changing over the decades, too; a baby appears in a back seat, then grows to drive in the front seat. By 2012, the artist has shifted to a digital camera.
In a way, the tradition caught in Leaving and Waving continues: today, Dikeman documents her own goodbyes to her adult son. The perspective has changed, however: most of these are shot from inside her home as he departs through the door, she says.
It is clear that the project, now a subject of a book and exhibits around the world, has become her life’s work.
“This was the most important thing I ever photographed in my life,” she says. “I’m still really reeling from the loss of these subjects. So even as an artist I’m struggling because they’re gone.
"Even if I’d never ended up at the Polygon or other galleries, I still would have something that I cared about. I poured my heart and soul into this.” And what would her mother and father have thought, to see these affecting shots of their driveway adieus commanding an entire exhibition hall? “They would have been pleased as punch,” Dikeman says with a smile, “and a little bit baffled.”
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