Nata Drachinskaya / Binom

This book is the winner of the 11th LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award in 2025.

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. His work was so highly classified that even his family remained unaware of its true nature. 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. One volume reconstructs the life remembered by a daughter through intimate family photographs and everyday moments. The second traces the hidden life that slowly emerges from the archive - a life built on silence, omission and carefully guarded truths. Together, the two narratives invite us to reflect on the distance between what we know and what remains concealed, revealing how personal histories can challenge official narratives and inherited ways of seeing the world. 

Working with family photographs, negatives, slides, official documents and her own images, Drachinskaya transforms the archive into a place of investigation rather than nostalgia. Everyday details - a summer house built by hand, evenings spent writing code, childhood games, treasured objects and family rituals - become fragments of a larger story. Rather than reconstructing the past, Binom asks how memory is formed, how silence is passed from one generation to the next, and how every family carries histories that are both shared and hidden. 

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. 

Language: English, French
Size: 16.5 x 22 cm, 192 pages
Binding: softcover
Publisher: Blow Up Press, 2026