There is nothing obviously exceptional about Deanna Dikeman’s now semi-viral photography series Leaving and Waving (1991-2018). The visual aesthetic of these images of Dikeman’s parents waving goodbye to their daughter over the course of twenty-seven years is familiar and rote. Her parents’ home in Sioux City, Iowa, where they retired after selling Dikeman’s childhood home—and where Dikeman took most of the photographs—is a unit of archetypal suburbia: a one-story house with a small porch, a verdant front lawn and garbage cans posted at the end of the driveway.

Dikeman herself would tell you that the subjects of the image are unexceptional, mired in their normalcy. Her father worked as a traffic manager for a Cargill grain processing plant, coordinating rail and truck shipments of soybeans. Dikeman’s mother was primarily a homemaker but worked a stint as a secretary in a Sioux City warehouse. Neither was a college graduate. In a video call a few days after the series’ Paris Photo debut, Dikeman tells Observer, “They just regarded themselves as kind of ordinary people from Iowa.” Later, she adds that “they had no artifice. They were not worried about how the world saw them.”