Barbara A. Diener Exhibit, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

BARBARA A. DIENER

I have always struggled with my identity. My father was German and my mother is American. I grew up bilingual and have dual citizenship. I have habitually identified as German, especially after my father passed away. However, over time I became aware that my sense of home is unsettled.

After graduating from high school in Germany I moved to Seattle. I was nineteen when I started attending Seattle Central Community College. From there I transferred to California College of the Arts where I received my BFA in Photography.

During my time at CCA I focused on photographing strangers as a way to peek into other people’s private lives. I met most of my subjects on the Internet and used their homes as backdrops, partly because there was something comforting and yet intriguing about being in a stranger’s personal space. I was also looking for a way to create connections to other people while simultaneously documenting their lives. It is an evolving progression to include myself in the staged images for my most recent body of work Familiar Moments.

These tableaus usually begin with my own experiences and often depict stereotypes, fantasies, and my own desires. I choose to stage the photographs in this body of work because doing so allows me to control precisely what I want to portray in each scene. I could not have this control if I were documenting an incident as it unfolds.

Through observation of and dialog with other people I have realized that it is typical to edit one’s own memories. We frequently amplify the good moments, exaggerate the bad and sometimes add details that never happened. In many ways this body of work is an edited version of my memories. I am glamorizing and recreating occurrences, making some of them more dramatic and creating others entirely based on fantasy and desire.