What Once Was
Fragments of What Once Was
Love 19
Yellow Haze
Marsh
Objects//Identity
Selected Commissions
About
What Once Was (2019-present)
My great-grandmother’s apartment has remained untouched since her death. When I first returned to it the following year in 2019, I felt compelled to photograph the traces of her life preserved within its rooms. I couldn’t help but keep returning to those images until 2024, when I photographed the apartment again and began to understand it as the genesis of What Once Was—an exploration of the remnants of my family’s lives in Bulgaria as a living, breathing archive, and her apartment as an inadvertent time capsule. Through photographs, letters, inherited objects, and rooms left behind, alongside contemporary portraits of my remaining relatives and their homes, I piece together a history I know only in fragments. Like many first-generation Americans, my identity has been forged by a combination of luck and loss: by an inherited nostalgia for a life I never fully lived and a cultural bond that has always felt just out of reach. What Once Was asks how we come to belong to histories we know only partially, and how identity takes shape not through recovering a complete past, but through learning to live with its absences.
The archive will always remain incomplete. Perhaps that is precisely what gives it its power.
Presented at the Parsons BFA Photography Thesis Exhibition at Pfizer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2025)
Four images featured in PhotoED Magazine Issue 74 Extra Edition (2025)
© Gabi Dinkova All Rights Reserved