Category: family

Issei Suda compulsively documents, with a great sense of humour, the daily life he shared with his daughter, wife, and dog.

Between 1991 and 1992, Issei Suda shot compulsively with a Minox camera, which is one of the smallest cameras there is. It is actually so small that it was commonly used for intelligence activities during the war. Issei Suda turned his lens towards the intimacy of his own home, documenting with a great sense of humour the daily life he shared with his daughter, wife and dog. The photographs presented in this book « Family Diary » — a title that Suda chose himself in the 1990s —, have never been published in book form before.

Biography

Issei Suda (born in Tokyo in 1940 and died in 2019),  graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography. He initially worked as a photographer for the Tenjo Sajiki theater company, before becoming an independent photographer.
A photographer of everyday life, the instantaneous, the furtive and the snapshot, he teaches at Tokyo College of Photography and Zokei University in Tokyo, as well as at the Photography Department of Osaka University of the Arts.

This print is part of a series of 5 prints by women photographers that we have previously published: Deanna Dikeman, Clémentine Schneidermann, Moe Suzuki, Irina Rozovsky and Mikiko Hara.

In Deanna Dikeman’s family album, ordinary moments embody universal truths and become a source of daily wonder.

After publishing Leaving and Waving in 2021, which presented only a glimpse of Deanna’s Dikeman’s 3-decade journey to document her family, Chose Commune is proud to introduce the photographer’s larger series in an exhaustive 300-page book: Relative Moments.

In Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman chronicles ordinary moments of her family’s activities. From gardening to cutting cake, from filling up the bird bath to mending a piece of clothing, from mowing the lawn to picking rhubarb, one gets to discover an everyday that might otherwise go unnoticed. In this book, which was generously edited and sequenced — 200 photographs in total — one is not only meant to see the moment shot in one photograph, but all the moments that compose the story. 

This project captures a visual history of the photographer family’s life, yet, there is an ongoing narrative embedded in these photographs that conveys larger, more universal truths about American culture, familiarity, and the endless source of everyday wonder that surrounds us.

Biography

Deanna Dikeman (born in 1954 in Sioux City, Iowa, USA) currently resides in Kansas City.
She has photographed her midwestern family and surroundings since 1985, when she left a corporate job to try a photography class. She has M.S. and B.S. degrees from Purdue University.
She received an Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship in 1996, and the United States Artists Booth Fellowship in 2008. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.