The Persistence of Family

• Prize
  Gold in Fine Art/Collage
• Jury Top 5 Selection

  Susan Baraz

• Photographer
  Diana Cheren Nygren
• Photo Date
  2020-2021

By compositing together old and new family photographs, this series enables generations to reach each other across time. Driven by personal longing, the images make real those things I hold dear. But in doing that, they address universal experience, interrogating the way in which family relationships and history play a role in shaping our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. They suggest that the present, in each of us, contains both the past and the future. This series portrays the layered process of becoming, and the complex interweaving of time, place, and identity.

Diana Cheren Nygren is a fine art photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores the visual character of place defined through physical environment and weather. Place has implications for our experience of the world, and reveals hints about the culture around it. 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.