IN THE EARLY 2010S, photographer Diana Markosian traveled to Armenia to meet her father after a separation of more than fifteen years. They hadn’t seen one another since Diana’s mother, Svetlana, took her and her brother from Russia to California when she was seven. “I am Diana, your daughter,” she said. He replied, “Why did it take you so long?” Two answers to that question play out across Markosian’s recent monographs, Santa Barbara (2020), and her latest, Father. The first is drenched in fantasy, like heavy reverb on a guitar: the photographer hired actors and a screenwriter to reenact Svetlana’s memories as if they were on Santa Barbara, a soap opera she was obsessed with. In Father, we see a drier truth and evidence of what it took to keep the fantasy going. Markosian reproduces a family photograph with the father’s figure cut out and correspondence documenting his futile search for the children, and she recounts childhood moments and conversations, like this one between her and her mother: “‘I am forgetting his eyes,’ I said. ‘Good,’ she replied.” If Markosian’s first book was indebted to the uncanny Sirkian sublime of Gregory Crewdson, the new volume feels closer to the affectionate alienation of Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home or the sleuth-at-work aesthetic of Sophie Calle’s pictures of strangers’ belongings. Old family shots, Super 8 stills, and childhood ephemera mingle with new portraits of father and daughter, the father alone, and the house they shared for a time, a place Markosian calls “a museum of my childhood.” They often look like two ghosts politely coexisting in purgatory, flickering between past and present, trying to envision a future together. But then the father disappears again, explaining, “It’s not the best time.”