A Daughter’s Search for an Invisible Presence

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When Diana Markosian was 7, she would stand outside her strange new home in Southern California and look toward the sky as each airplane passed overhead, wondering if her father would be on that plane. Or the next one.

But he never came at all.

Ms. Markosian, now 24, arrived in the United States from Russia in 1996 with her older brother. Her mother had taken them from Moscow, leaving their father behind. It had been a difficult marriage, and she wanted nothing to do with her mostly absent husband. She headed for Southern California because she had seen the television show “Santa Barbara,” which informed her picture of America. The reality was quite different, and she worked multiple jobs to provide for her children.

For many years, Ms. Markosian waited for her father to come to the United States and find her. Eventually, she stopped hoping and focused instead on identifying whatever defect in herself might have made her father stay away. She worked hard, excelled in school and earned a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University when she was 20.

“For so long, I thought my father wasn’t there because of me,” she said. “I always wanted to excel so that my father would notice me and he would care. I may not be honest about it, but a lot of what I do, I want to prove things to myself and that I belong here.”

She became an accomplished photographer at a young age. She returned to Moscow in 2010 to work as a freelance photographer, and her images from Chernobyl were featured on Lens in 2011.

Though she knew very little about her father, she set out to find him. Her brother visited from the United States, and together they went to Armenia to see her maternal grandparents. Her father lived in the same town.

“My brother remembered where he lived because my brother grew up in that home until he was about 4,” she said. “The first time we went there, I didn’t have a camera. This wasn’t a project. This was, ‘We need to meet our father.’ ”

Diana Markosian Ms. Markosian with her father as a child. “One of the only images of me and my father together. I saw it for the first time at age 23,” she said.

But their father didn’t recognize them. He refused to believe that they were who they claimed to be.

“I couldn’t believe that I had to convince my father that I was his child,” Ms. Markosian said. “I stated facts â€" when I was born, who my mother was.”

They stayed for a few hours but she was happy to leave as soon as possible. The following year, however, she returned and lived with her father for several months, trying to create a relationship. This time, she brought her camera and, as she slowly got to know him, began to photograph. It made for an interesting story â€" albeit one a little closer to the bone than her previous projects â€" but this was how she was used to experiencing, or not experiencing, her life.

This story, however, was different. She couldn’t remove herself. It wasn’t so much a story as it was a painful quest of self-exploration. In a sense, the photographs were merely a tool, a conveyance. She was documenting her human scars.

“Most of this was difficult for me, but it forced me to be there. It forced me,” she said. “This was about what I set out to do and who I wanted to love: my father.”

The story, with Ms. Markosian’s own text and more photos, will appear in The Times’s Sunday Review section on Father’s Day, and in an online feature.

At first, her father tried to connect. But he was often absent, even when he was home. He had a newborn daughter and a new family with whom he did not share a roof. He lived with and took care of his own father, who is now 90. On her second extended visit, Ms. Markosian realized that her hoped-for reconciliation wasn’t happening the way she had imagined. She began to feel anger, an emotion she wasn’t comfortable with.

She spent much of the next year with her father. Their interactions consumed her and left her feeling raw. Eventually, though, she was able to find an equilibrium, if not a close relationship.

“I realized that it had nothing to do with me,” she said. “For the first time, I felt like that was just who he is. It made it so much easier to forgive him, because I understood at that point that he didn’t understand, and he would never understand.”

It was not the resolution she had hoped for, but it was one she could live with.

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