A mom strikes from Russia to America to marry a stranger. Years later her story is instructed in photographs

By Newsworldpress Last updated Aug 23, 2021

For 20 years, photographer Diana Markosian thought she knew her household’s immigration historical past — or the gist of it, at the least. In 1996, when she was seven, Markosian’s mom, Svetlana, woke her and her older brother, David, in the course of the evening, telling them to pack all of their essential issues: the three of them have been going to see America. The best way Markosian remembers it, neither of them requested any questions. That evening they boarded a airplane in Moscow certain for Los Angeles, with out saying goodbye to their father.

Diana Markosian, My Parents Together, 2019, from Santa Barbara
(Aperture, 2020) © Diana Markosian

Diana Markosian, My Mother and father Collectively, 2019, from Santa Barbara
(Aperture, 2020) © Diana Markosian Credit score: Courtesy Diana Markosian

Once they disembarked on the airport, the household was greeted by Eli, a pudgy, much-older, American good friend of their mom’s, who introduced them into his residence in coastal Santa Barbara. The journey, Markosian was instructed, was meant to be a vacation. However after Svetlana and Eli married lower than a yr later (they remained so for 9), Santa Barbara grew to become residence.

“After we got here to America within the ’90s, it felt like an absolute dream to be right here. (My mother) fell in love with being an American, she embraced it,” Markosian recalled in a cellphone interview. “I’m not positive my mother was leaving something behind. Every thing had already been taken.”

Even earlier than they lived there, Markosian had been conscious of some model of Santa Barbara. The 1980s American cleaning soap opera of the identical identify was the primary TV present of its form to be broadcast in post-Soviet Russia, and her mom was among the many thousands and thousands of Russians who made “Santa Barbara” a success, escaping right into a world that felt thrilling, unique and far-removed from their very own.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Svetlana, an economist, and her husband Arsen, an engineer — Armenians who emigrated to Moscow to complete their doctorates, and separated earlier than Markosian was born — have been residing in poverty, amid widespread unemployment and hyperinflation. Arsen hawked Matryoshka dolls in Pink Sq. and bought do-it-yourself Barbie attire throughout Moscow to make ends meet. Svetlana assisted him along with his bootleg Barbie enterprise, and waited within the bread strains for handouts to feed the household.

Diana Markosian, Moscow Breadline, 2019, from Santa Barbara
(Aperture, 2020) © Diana Markosian
Credit score: Courtesy Diana Markosian

However in January 2017, when Markosian was 27, that narrative was disrupted. Because the newly ascended President Trump enacted his first journey ban, Markosian, who was then working as a photojournalist for the likes of Nationwide Geographic and the New Yorker, started urgent her mom about their very own immigration story.

“I simply began speaking about it and making an attempt to grasp: How did we even handle to do that? How did we handle to come back to America? And I noticed [my mother had] this actual want to inform me, and this readiness to disclose one thing that felt so shameful, so tough to inform me. And that is sort of the way it took place” Markosian mentioned.

In actuality, Svetlana, enamored with the imaginative and prescient of America she’d seen on TV, had met Eli via an advert she’d had circulated in American newspapers and magazines via a Russian company that matched Soviet girls with American males — a well-liked route for ladies seeking to immigrate on the time. Her proposition was easy: “I’m a younger girl from Moscow, and want to meet a sort man who can present me America.” Her first husband had had no thought she was seeking to transfer, and was blindsided when she flew the world over along with his youngsters and severed communication. (When she was 22, Markosian and her brother tracked her father down throughout a visit to Armenia. He had returned to Yerevan, the capital, the place the household had lived when Markosian was a baby.)

Markosian was shocked. “You maintain your dad and mom up on a pedestal and I believe, for me, there was this anger, (this sense) that this cannot be our story. Why did not I do know extra about this? Why wasn’t I included on this choice?” she mentioned. “It isn’t simply us coming to America and residing an American life. It is us coming to America, retaining this secret of the place we’re for 20 years, and of not seeing my father for 20 years. It is utterly abandoning our previous for this dream.”

Diana Markosian, The Disappointment, 2019, from Santa Barbara
(Aperture, 2020) © Diana Markosian
Credit score: Courtesy Diana Markosian

To assist her course of the revelation, and be taught to empathize together with her mom’s choice to desert her life in Moscow, Markosian got down to reenact her household’s journey on digital camera, via a brief movie and an accompanying photograph collection titled “Santa Barbara.” Shot from her mom’s perspective, the venture noticed her auditioning tons of of actors to play her members of the family (she checked out 384 girls earlier than she discovered an actor to play Svetlana, somebody “who would perceive what it meant to surrender all the pieces for this one choice”), and taking pictures in places throughout California, in addition to the household’s former house in Yerevan . (The present tenants allowed her to lease the area.) Ana Imnadze, the actor who performs Svetlana, even wears items from her mom’s wardrobe; Armen Margaryan, who performs Arsen, wears her father’s watch.

“I began seeing it as a narrative, and making an attempt to divorce myself from my very own life,” she mentioned. “It wanted to be a piece of fiction, nearly, for me to simply accept it, to course of it, to fall in love with it. As a result of in any other case, it simply felt too, too painful.”

The photographs that comprise “Santa Barbara” are a cautious mixture of the cinematic and the non-public, fantasy and actuality. There are dramatically framed home scenes, moodily lit (nodding to the darkish Americana of Gregory Crewdson and David Lynch), and overexposed snapshots, together with one which exhibits her “father” holding out a birthday cake, a nonetheless life with cigarettes and a cherry-red rotary cellphone, which appears like its been borrowed from a household scrapbook.

Palm Springs, from Santa Barbara, 2020 © Diana Markosian, courtesy the artist Credit score: Courtesy Diana Markosian

Equally, Markosian mentioned the accompanying movie, operating about 15 minutes, “depends on all these totally different codecs to sort of perceive a chapter in my household’s life.” Recreated moments from Russia and California are intercut with Tremendous eight movies and photographs from Markosian’s childhood, in addition to auditioning actors’ display exams. A lot of the dialogue is natural: At varied factors, Svetlana is interrogated by her doppelganger, dressed as her youthful self, over the dinner desk; and Markosian and Svetlana have their very own back-and-forth in voiceover.

Markosian had initially meant for the venture to be scripted. She even recruited one of many authentic writers from “Santa Barbara,” Lynda Myles, to pen a script, and gave her household the chance to edit it. Partly, this was a option to mitigate her personal anxiousness about telling a narrative during which she felt like a bit participant.

Diana Markosian, The Wedding, 2019, from Santa Barbara
(Aperture, 2020) © Diana Markosian

Diana Markosian, The Marriage ceremony, 2019, from Santa Barbara
(Aperture, 2020) © Diana Markosian
Credit score: Courtesy Diana Markosian

“The toughest a part of this venture was coming to phrases with the truth that I used to be the narrator,” she mentioned “I generally sit with that thought and assume why me? I used to be the youngest individual within the room; I actually did not have a voice in any of the selections that have been made. Why am I the one who’s within the place to inform this story? “It was a collective reminiscence, and all of us had our personal model.”

However discovering a model of occasions that her household may agree on — from the nuances of Arsen and Svetlana’s relationship, to the realities of life in California — proved not possible. She introduced Myles’ script to her father in Armenia, giving him the chance to inject his personal perspective, however when she returned to California, her mom ended up crossing out his phrases and changing them together with her personal. The method repeated when she handed the script to her brother.

Hearst Castle, from Santa Barbara, 2020 © Diana Markosian, courtesy the artist

“The entire thing is disputed (however) I believe we reached a spot of understanding that we have been by no means going to essentially agree on any of it. (The variations have been) not so dramatic that I could not put out a venture, however sufficient that I began to grasp how fascinating reminiscence is, and that if I leaned into the grey, if I leaned into each perspective, I might arrive at a more in-depth model of the reality than simply this one model that I referred to as my very own,” Markosian mentioned. “I seemed on the script (after everybody had added their notes), and it grew to become a bit of artwork in itself.”

Diana Markosian, The Argument , 2019, from Santa Barbara (Aperture,
2020) © Diana Markosian
Credit score: Courtesy Diana Markosian

In November 2020, Markosian launched “Santa Barbara” as her debut monograph with Aperture. This summer season, she is going to exhibit the photographs and debut the completed movie on the San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork, sharing one model of her household’s American dream with the world. There are additionally plans to show it into an immersive present on the Worldwide Middle of Images in New York in September.

“I bear in mind how particular it was to come back to America, and I by no means took that without any consideration. It simply got here with a really massive sacrifice for all of us,” she mentioned. “That second likelihood to recollect and recreate part of your life is an absolute reward, and I believe that is what artwork has given me.”

Supply