A family archive becomes a problem of interpretation in Nata Drachinskaya’s Binom. Following her father’s suicide in 2001, photographs and personal records disclosed his long career in cryptography, work previously unknown to his daughters. Drachinskaya approaches that discovery through the difference between the father she remembers and the person suggested by surviving documents. The book brings her photographs and drawings into dialogue with the archive credited to Andrey Shtepa; it does not offer a simple photographic biography with every uncertainty resolved.
Its paired volumes make that uncertainty tangible. Domestic recollections occupy one strand, while another examines the concealed professional life. Reading across them involves comparison: the familiarity of family pictures cannot explain everything in the official record, and documents cannot replace lived memory. The mathematical title, referring to an expression with two terms, gives this divided structure a precise name without promising that the two accounts will add up to a complete person. Photography functions here as both intimate possession and material requiring scrutiny.
The project took shape in a 2022 workshop with Yumi Goto and Jan Rosseel and appeared in a 92-copy handmade edition in 2025. Its LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award belongs to that year. The edition catalogued here is the subsequent July 2026 publication by BLOW UP PRESS and Les Rencontres d’Arles: 192 pages, English and French text, and 152 photographs and drawings. A grey-board gatefold cover carries two mounted photographs. The publisher credits the design to Drachinskaya, Goto, Aneta Kowalczyk and Rosseel.
For a collector, the relationship between these physical divisions and the divided portrait is more informative than the award alone. Binom shows how a family-based photographic investigation can use the book’s construction to sustain conflicting evidence, rather than merely illustrate a finished story. This standard edition has a stated print run of 1,000 copies; it should be distinguished from both the earlier handmade publication and the separately offered special edition. Its interest lies in the reader’s movement between recollection, image and document.
