But Markosian never gave up searching for the man she barely knew, his face carefully cut from many of the photographs brought over from Russia. His memory became a spectre – the presence of absence that weighed heavily on her soul, while she searched the faces of strangers passing on the street, hoping one day that he might appear.
In 2013, Markosian, then 24, and her brother travelled to Moscow and then Armenia, determined to find him – only to do just that. “I didn’t recognise him. He didn’t recognise me,” Markosian remembers of the first time they met. She spoke freely, telling him what she had gleaned from her mother over the years: they had been abandoned for another woman. But none of that was true, and suddenly she was faced with having to unlearn everything she had come to believe about a man she never really knew.
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With Father, the new book and exhibition, Markosian crafts a heartrending story of grief, love, and loss – of wounds that time can never heal but instead are carried within as a kind of alchemy. Seamlessly weaving portrait, interior, still life, family photos, candy-coloured stills from home movies, personal correspondence, and official documents of her father’s fruitless search for his children over the years, Father is a complicated portrait of a man who is both memory and flesh bound in the complex archetype of fatherhood.
