Absent presence: a photographer fill in the gaps of her childhood with some famous faces

Photographer Natalya Reznik's parents divorced under bitter circumstances when she was three years old. As a consequence she never got to know her father. After her mother discovered he had another wife and child, she destroyed most of the family's photos of them together. With no clear image of how he looked, Reznik tried to recreate a picture of her father using the few photos she found in old albums. Using digital manipulation techniques, she also inserted screen icons such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Marain into photographs beside her mother to create an idealised new family. "This project is very personal," she says. "It's somewhere between documentary and fiction, where the dreams of my mother are real but the memory I created for myself is fictional." Reznik is currently an art history researcher at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and a photography teacher at Fotodepartment, a St-Petersburg-based non-profit organisation. Her work has been exhibited widely across Russia, Europe and the USA.