Nata Drachinskaya, Binom, 2026

For most of her life, Nata Drachinskaya believed she knew her father. After his suicide in 2001, a box of photographs, slides, family albums, official documents and personal belongings revealed a life she had never known.

For more than twenty-five years, her father worked as a cryptographer, developing encryption algorithms to secure state communications. As Drachinskaya began to explore his photographic archive, what started as an attempt to understand one man’s life gradually evolved into an exploration of family, memory, secrecy and the invisible forces that shape ordinary lives.

Structured as two interconnected volumes, Binom mirrors the duality at the heart of the project. Working with family photographs, negatives, slides, official documents and her own images, Drachinskaya transforms the archive into a place of investigation rather than nostalgia.

The title Binom derives from the mathematical term binomial – an algebraic expression composed of two terms. Throughout the publication, this idea of duality resonates on multiple levels: two lives, two narratives, two versions of reality, the visible and the invisible. Mathematics itself becomes a powerful metaphor – precise and impartial, capable of serving profoundly different human purposes.

The concept of Binom was developed during the 2022 Photobook as an Object workshop led by Yumi Goto and Jan Rosseel in collaboration with Reminders Photography Stronghold. The project was first self-published by the artist in 2025 as a limited handmade edition of only 92 copies.

This book is the winner of the 11th LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award in 2025. Its publication was made possible by support from the award’s founders: the Rencontres d’Arles & the LUMA Foundation.