The Persistence of Family by Diana Cheren Nygren

During the isolation resulting from the pandemic, family has taken on a new centrality. 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.

The images in this series are composites of my old family photographs, photographs I took of my children as they grew, and the New England landscapes in which my children and I grew up and became people. With these images, generations reach for each other across time. They are also, in many ways, self portraits. I exist in the tension of the space between those who came before me and those who will come after. Their longing makes real those things I hold dear. Ultimately, "The Persistence of Family" portrays the layered process of becoming, and the complex interweaving of time, place, and identity.





Diana Cheren Nygren
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. 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 Dek Unu Mag, Square Magazine, Photonews, Domus Magazine online, Cities Magazine, and iLeGaLiT, and won Best In Show in the exhibition Nurture/Nature juried by photographer Laura McPhee, the Grand Prize in Photography from Art Saves Humanity, Discovery of the Year in the 2020 Tokyo International Foto Awards, 2nd place in Fine Art/Collage in the 2020 International Photo Awards, silver in Fine Art/Collage in the Budapest International Foto Awards, bronze in Fine Art/Digitally Enhanced in the 2020 Prix de la Photographie, was longlisted for the Hopper Prize and the BBA Photography Prize, and was a finalist for Fresh2020 and Urban2020 and a Merit Winner in the 2020 Rfotofolio Selections.
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