“I was processing things as I was learning about them. So much time had passed, yet once everyone was cast, and we travelled back to Santa Barbara, it was no longer a production,” the photographer explains. “I thought I could separate myself from the experiences I had as a child, and really take this on as a director.
It’s Svetlana that Markosian’s empathetic lens seeks to understand most of all, and the sacrifices she made to emigrate with her two children in search of a better life. Svetlana had viewed it all as the arrival to nowhere, with the hope of going somewhere. In 1996, the ‘real’ Svetlana fled in the night with her two children in tow, boarding a plane to the US in search of new beginnings and met on the other side by an older man, Eli, whom she had met through a classified ad. The body of work, which encompasses photography and a narrative film, hinges upon Markosian’s mother, Svetlana – like all of the ‘characters’ in the series, played by an actor. It’s also an interrogation of the American dream: the image that is sold versus the reality that is more often lived. Markosian’s straddling of truth and fiction isn’t purely for the purposes of reenacting her early life experiences. All images from Santa Barbara, 2019 SFMoma © Diana Markosian It’s something we didn’t expect, but in turn, we all came to be our characters.” “I think for everyone who participated in this project. Don’t get me wrong, I am not delusional, but it really feels that real to me,” Markosian tells CR. “These images don’t feel like fiction to me. Reconstructing her past in this way doesn’t feel out of place, for what are memories anyway if not imagined recollections of time gone by, skewed through the lens of half-remembered subjectivity? It leaves you wondering: what is real, trustworthy, certain? And what is fiction and fantasy? Part-staged narrative, part-documentary project, the photographer worked with a casting director, a group of actors and a scriptwriter from the 1980s soap opera Santa Barbara (which she watched while growing up) to reenact the final days of her family life in post-Soviet Russia, and the beginnings of her new life – with mum, without dad – in California. Diana Markosian reconstructs the previous in her sequence Santa Barbaraĭiana Markosian’s series Santa Barbara is a thing of questions and contrasts.
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