Father Son Father is a new photobook by St. Petersburg-based photographer Oleg Kolimbet. Drawing on photographs from both his father’s archive and his own family albums, the book explores the shifting roles of father and son, and the responsibilities that pass from one generation to the next.
Created against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and a period of growing political, social, and environmental instability, the book reflects on the vulnerability of family bonds in times of uncertainty. Rather than addressing these events directly, Kolimbet transforms them into the material of memory, dream, and metaphor.
At its core is a father’s anxiety for his child’s fate. This anxiety takes the form of apocalyptic dreams in which he searches for his missing son amid flood, war, epidemic, displacement, and societal collapse. Moving through memories and dreams, the father balances between Hell—fear, loss, helplessness, and separation—and Paradise, embodied by memories of time spent together and idyllic visions of heaven.
The project is constructed through an associative visualization of memories and dreams rather than a linear narrative. Its imagery is drawn entirely from family archives: photographs from the artist’s father’s archive documenting his childhood and that of his brother, alongside images from Kolimbet’s own archive of his children, landscapes, and everyday objects. None of the photographs were made specifically for this project. Faces are often obscured or absent, echoing the fragmented nature of memory and the indistinct imagery of dreams.
Alongside family photographs, the work incorporates landscapes, sculptures, frescoes, and symbolic objects that function as visual traces of memory and cultural archetypes. Water, earth, sky, trees, and fragments of religious imagery recur throughout the book, evoking ideas of origin, belonging, separation, and transcendence.
The alternation of historical black-and-white photographs with contemporary images emphasizes continuity across generations and the cyclical passage from son to father. Throughout the book, the identities of father and son remain deliberately ambiguous, reinforcing the idea that these roles are ultimately interchangeable. By avoiding a specific time or place, the work moves beyond autobiography toward a broader reflection on inheritance, responsibility, memory, and love.
