More than a decade ago, artist and curator Liza Faktor started looking more deeply into the annals of her family while navigating the dissolution of her own relationship and confronting the aftermath of her father’s sudden death. She turned to photography to explore the nature of a committed relationship while questioning what family truly means to her.
This personal inquiry evolved into Cadence, a profound long-term photographic study that follows Faktor’s chosen family—friends and loved ones in her native Russia, Europe, and the US. The artist embarked on an exploration of love and the many ways it manifests in relation to immediate families—parents, partners, and children. She was interested in how the concept of family has evolved to include close friends, neighbors, and animal companions, and has expanded traditional kinship structures, exploring how our deep curiosity about each other leads us to realize our full human potential.
What makes the images in Cadence so extraordinary is Faktor’s ability to grasp the ambivalence of intimacy and distance, of being close to and far from those we love. Her work became a contemplation about the process of arrival to a better version of being human, where the arrival somehow never comes. This search for identity in relationship to loved ones intersected with the struggle for work-life balance, as both Faktor and her subjects grappled with professional aspirations while seeking to understand who they really were.
The resulting body of work offers a quiet meditation on love, closeness, trust, fragility, heartbreak, interdependency, and happiness. Cadence is about belonging not to a place but to people we are blessed to know deeply. The series also traverses the speculations of imagined family: the impossibility of realizing dreams with prematurely lost loved ones, the family prescribed by social norms, and the family we carve for ourselves over our adulthood. This exploration helped Faktor transcend the expectations imposed by her upbringing and social framework on what family and happiness should look like.
In her artist statement, Faktor describes Cadence as “a score that maps our inner movements and emotional states when we are deeply entangled and grow into each other.” The work tracks the anatomy of a committed relationship, examining love’s many faces—romantic, parental, spiritual, and interspecies. It captures the profound desire to truly know another person and be known in return, alongside the fragility and the bottomless fear of stepping into someone else’s life. The project encompasses the full spectrum of shared experience: boredom, frustration, pain, joy, silliness, happiness, and the crucial act of giving space to one another while maintaining openness to whatever comes.
Faktor reflects on the paradoxical nature of long-term love: “It’s quite mundane, the everyday of the long love, but also endlessly magical and rare, as we are sharing a home with others.” She describes the search for the traces of home within shared landscapes, the exchange of familiarity and comfort, and the mutual confirmation of both inadequacy and achievement. Perhaps most poignantly, she suggests that our capacity for love and care may be fundamental to our survival as a species, making our cohabitation with other living creatures meaningful.
Over the years of making Cadence, going through the significant changes connected to her immigration, her multicultural identity, and generational traumas that resulted in prolonged uprootedness, the project’s significance deepened. The pandemic years, which tested our closest ties and friendships, added further complexity and layers of meaning to the work. The title and the narrative structure of the series that reference musical terms were inspired by the artist’s musical background.
Cadence emerges at a crucial cultural moment when traditional family structures are being fundamentally questioned and redefined, positioning Faktor’s work within broader sociological and artistic discourses about intimacy, belonging, and social connection. The project's strength lies in its patient, longitudinal approach—a methodology that mirrors the very relationships it seeks to document, requiring sustained commitment and evolving understanding over time.
This temporal dimension distinguishes Cadence from more surface explorations of contemporary family life, offering instead a nuanced portrait of the relationship’s music.
Cadence stands as a vital artistic statement contributing to timely conversations about creating your own tribe, sustaining your community, friendships, and family in an increasingly fragmented world. The project has resulted in Faktor’s first monograph, to be published in 2026, and was recently featured in a solo exhibition at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China.
About Liza Faktor
Liza Faktor is a visual artist and independent curator. Her work was exhibited in Spain, Norway, China, Russia, UK and the US, and is in private collections in the UK, Switzerland, Lebanon, Russia, and the US. She curated over twenty exhibitions and festival programs on the intersection of photography, moving image, and emerging media, lectured and taught workshops worldwide. She is based in Portland, Oregon.
www.lizafaktor.com
@faktorl
