2024-11-12 event date. Deanna Dikeman’s “Leaving and Waving” is built from a gesture most people perform without thinking: the wave goodbye at the end of a visit. The supplied source explains that for 27 years Dikeman photographed those departures from her parents’ home in Sioux City, Iowa, beginning with a quick snapshot in 1991 and continuing until the routine became an archive. What started as a coping mechanism for the sadness of leaving grew into a sustained visual record of family life, aging, and loss.
The project’s emotional power comes from repetition. Each image shows the same basic moment, but the people in frame change as years pass. The source says Dikeman later recognized the series as part of a larger body of work called Relative Moments, which had already been tracking her relatives since 1986. The leaving-and-waving sequence then became a way to see family history in slow motion: the parents getting older, the departures becoming more poignant, and the spaces around the gestures gradually transforming.
The archive also records absence. In 2009, the source notes, Dikeman photographed a departure after her father had died a few days after his 91st birthday. Her mother continued the ritual, but the emotional tone changed. By 2017, her mother had moved into assisted living, and the goodbyes shifted to that setting before her death later that year. The source suggests that the photographs are not merely sentimental. They are a structured way of observing how domestic life changes when illness, aging, and mortality begin to reshape what a visit means.
The value of the project lies partly in its restraint. Dikeman did not set out to make a formal documentary project with an obvious thesis. She took the pictures as a private response to sorrow, then discovered that the accumulation itself carried meaning. That is an important distinction for anyone thinking about personal photography. The images are not staged to force a narrative. They gain force because they are ordinary, repeated, and emotionally honest.
The source’s framing also suggests why the project has resonated beyond the family it depicts. Most people know the feeling of leaving a parent’s house after a visit and of seeing time move a little faster each year. Dikeman’s photographs isolate that feeling and make it visible. They show that the rituals of departure can become a record of how families persist, even as people disappear from the frame.
In that sense, “Leaving and Waving” is both intimate and universal. It turns a private habit into a meditation on memory, and a casual hand gesture into a long-term document of change. The source presents the series as a story about family, aging, and goodbyes, and the accumulation of photographs makes that story feel undeniable.
The photographs endure because they are not trying to outsmart time. They simply keep returning to the same threshold and recording what has changed. That gives the series a documentary power that can be hard to manufacture in more ambitious projects. Viewers see not only a family’s farewell ritual but also the cumulative effect of years, illness, and absence. In the end, the work shows that repetition can reveal emotion more clearly than a single decisive image ever could.
