The empty grocery stores and utilitarian boulevards of Moscow were a far cry from the gilded glamor of California in the early nineties. But for three nights per week, photographer Diana Markosian, with her mother and brother, would be transported to the sun-kissed shores of Santa Barbara in the first US soap opera of the same name to be broadcast on Russian state television.

Santa Barbara (Aperture, 2020) is also the name of the debut monograph from the image-maker that charts her family’s dramatic upheaval from Russia to the US in 1996 after the fall of the Soviet Union. Known for her experimental approach to storytelling, she looks at her upbringing for inspiration in a work that collates film stills, scriptwriting, and reconstructed scenes from family photographs to present a multidimensional history that reads as fact but feels like fiction.

Markosian’s narrative-driven talent has taken her to remote corners of the world on projects for The New Yorker and National Geographic, but it was her mother’s story—escaping to Santa Barbara with two young children to marry an American she had never met in person—that places the image-maker at the forefront of a new generation of photographers pushing the boundaries of documentary.

Throughout her travels, however, one of the most important places she visited was Armenia to visit her father who she had not spoken to in twenty years. Through the series Inventing My Father (2013) and Mornings (With You) (2016), snapshots of which we see in this episode, Markosian attempts to ascertain what life was like for the man who was left behind; to imagine the relationship they could have had and explore feelings she might never develop. Ultimately, Markosian’s highly unconventional portrait of her family is a study in disappointment, desire and the American Dream; all the makings of a convincing soap opera.