Diana Cheren Nygren
United States
Biography
Diana Cheren Nygren is a fine art photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores they way humanity inhabits the environment, both natural and built, 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 numerous publications, and won a number of awards including Discovery of the Year in the 2020 Tokyo International Foto Awards and 2nd place in the 2020 International Photo Awards. The Persistence of Family was awarded Best New Talent in the 2021 Prix de la Photographie de Paris.
Project
“The Persistence of Family” by Diana Cheren Nygren is a deeply reflective photographic series that explores how family relationships, memory and history shape identity and belonging across generations. The work is built from composited images that combine Nygren’s own old family photographs with new portraits of her children and landscapes from New England, creating layered tableaux in which past and present coexist in poetic dialogue.
Driven by a longing for connection and an awareness of how ancestral narratives influence the present, the series invites viewers to consider how personal and collective histories are carried forward through time. Through its evocative interplay of imagery, The Persistence of Family suggests that each of us contains echoes of both the past and the future, portraying the complex interweaving of time, place and identity in a visually lyrical and emotionally resonant way.
