What if the person you thought you knew best had lived an entirely different life?

For most of her life, Nata Drachinskaya believed she knew her father. After his suicide in 2001, she discovered a box containing photographs, slides, family albums, official documents and personal belongings. Inside was the first evidence of a life that had remained almost entirely invisible to her and her family.

For more than twenty-five years, her father worked as a cryptographer, developing encryption algorithms for highly classified state communications. The nature of his work was so closely guarded that even his two daughters knew nothing about it. What began as an attempt to understand the father she had lost became a much larger investigation into family, memory, secrecy and the fragile boundary between what we know and what we believe we know.

Binom takes physical form as two interconnected volumes - two sides of the same life. One reconstructs the world Drachinskaya remembers: family holidays, a summer house built by hand, childhood games, everyday rituals and the quiet intimacy of family photographs. The other follows the life that emerges from the archive: official documents, uniforms, photographs and fragments of a professional existence kept secret for decades.

Neither volume tells the whole story. Together, they create a space between memory and evidence, between the family portrait and the historical record. Drachinskaya does not attempt to solve every mystery. Instead, she allows the gaps, contradictions and silences in the archive to remain visible - reminding us that even the people closest to us can contain entire lives we never knew existed.

The title Binom comes from the mathematical term for an expression composed of two terms. Here, the idea becomes both structure and metaphor: two volumes, two lives, two narratives, two versions of reality - the visible and the concealed. Mathematics, with its precision and neutrality, becomes an unexpected counterpoint to the deeply human ambiguities of memory and truth.

Winner of the 11th LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award, 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 Drachinskaya in 2025 as a handmade edition of only 92 copies.

This edition, published by BLOW UP PRESS in collaboration with Les Rencontres d’Arles and LUMA Foundation, expands that original project into a fully realised two-volume book.

A Special Edition of Binom, including a signed and numbered pigment print and a computer punch card featuring a printed collage by the artist, is also available.

***

Awards:

• Shortlisted for the 2026 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Awards - First PhotoBook category

***

In the press:

• Lenscratch (English)

***

Photo archives: Andrey Shtepa
Photographs and drawings: Nata Drachinskaya
Texts: Nata Drachinskaya
Book design: Nata Drachinskaya, Yumi Goto, Aneta Kowalczyk, Jan Rosseel 

Cover: Grey board gatefold cover with 2 mounted photographs
Papers: Arena Smooth Natural 140 g, Arena Bulk Natural 100 g

Format: 16.5 × 22 cm
Number of pages: 192
Number of photographs and drawings: 152
Language: English, French 

Print run: 1000 copies 
Printing and binding: Skleniarz (Cracow, Poland)

Publication date: July 2026 
Publisher: BLOW UP PRESS (Warsaw, Poland), Les Rencontres d’Arles (Arles, France)
ISBN: 978-83-977057-4-6