Our connections to our ancestors and our descendants often feel stronger than connections to those around us. I often wish my children knew my grandparents. These are portraits of my children as the product of a history of lives lived and intertwined, each effecting and shaping the other.
This series interrogates the role of family relationships and history in shaping our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. I have composited my old family photographs, photographs I took of my children as they grew, and images of the New England landscapes in which my children and I grew up. With these compositions, generations reach for each other across time. I exist in the tension of the space between those who came before me and those who will come after. The project is driven by a longing for connection that makes real those things I hold dear, and by an anxiety around individual responsibility in passing on family history.
Though rooted in personal narratives, the pictures also address both a universal experience and a culturally specific one. My father's parents came to the United States to escape religious persecution in Ukraine. My mother's family came earlier, and were part of a jewish community that tried desperately to erase their history and assimilate into the upper crust of Midwestern American culture. Both of these histories have formed me. Many of their specifics seem lost on my children, although I have watched them become more connected to their history as overt acts of antisemitism in the United States become more commonplace. This work raises questions about genetics in determining identity and connecting people, about the continuity of historical narratives, and suggests that each of us contains both the past and the future. The project is a portrait of a family, a portrait of the artist through the people that have formed her, and an investigation of the individual as part of a historical continuum.
Author biography
Diana Cheren Nygren is a fine art photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores they way humanity inhabits the environment, both natural and built, around it. Her photographs address serious social questions through a blend of documentary practice, invention, and humor.
Diana was trained as an art historian with a focus on modern and contemporary art, and the relationship of artistic production to its socio-political context. Her emphasis on careful composition in her photographic work, as well as her subject matter, reflects this training. Her work as a photographer is the culmination of a life-long investment in the power of art and visual culture to shape and influence social change.
Her project When the Trees are Gone has been featured in numerous publications, and won a number of awards including Discovery of the Year in the 2020 Tokyo International Foto Awards and 2nd place in the 2020 International Photo Awards. The Persistence of Family was awarded Best New Talent in the 2021 Prix de la Photographie de Paris.