Sofiya Loriashvili, My Book – Fragments of a Youth

Every frame reflected through Sofiya Loriashvili’s lens is like a time tunnel. In the background, you encounter crackling worlds, storms in the heart and echoes of lost identities. Loriashvili’s photographs go beyond the ordinary; each image is a symbol of the bittersweet contradictions of life, of passion and collapse, of the fragility of existence. Because sometimes, the darkest nights are the places where we find ourselves. 

With the My Book project, Loriashvili positions herself as an evolving narrator, aiming to create a physical memory against the ever-changing nature of the digital world and to leave a permanent trace of time. For her, this has at times allowed her to stay in the moment, and at other times it has been a means of personal struggle. Each piece in the project is not only a physical, but also an emotional and mental integration — each step is a synthesis of destruction, rebirth and conscious disappearance.  

Loriashvili’s photographic practice invites us to engage in a compelling dialog with the world around us and to consider what we witness in a different context. Since 2017, she has been capturing censored lives in their raw form, creating a 7-year personal archive. 

Loriashvili’s central themes of love, friendship and death find a place in the darkness of the night, depression and addiction. The traces of crisis, war and tension looming in the background is a reality we encounter in every detail. With this reality, she presents a valuable narrative that reflects the society and the period. At the same time, the addiction and rehabilitation processes she struggled with are among the periods reflected in the frame.

To commemorate this chapter, which she is currently completing, Sofiya Loriashvili has designed her book in the form of a small guidebook that you can carry with you. Her intention with this design is that the experiences of those who carry it are unique but not isolated. The intimate and moving stories in the guide remind readers that their situation is not an isolated one, but is as varied as the people they have met over the years, ranging from documentary to street photography to mise-en-scene.  

“With my camera, I could see things more clearly,” she says.

This project is almost like an expression of an inner collapse and regrouping. It shows that for her photography is not only a means of visual representation, but also a way of analyzing herself and the complexities of life. Describing herself as a man with detective glasses, like Nan Goldin’s works, Loriashvili’s also photography is not only about portraits; her curiosity about people’s living spaces and the traces they leave is an important part of her photographic approach. Photographing people’s daily lives, the traces they leave behind, abandoned and what can be described as “waste” reveals the depth and universality of this process.  

She likes to go deep into people’s lives and thinks that this makes it possible to tell a complete story by photographing not only people but also everything that surrounds them, reflecting their subconscious. The materialization of these lost traces of the unconscious through photographs also evokes Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror phase”. According to Lacan, when a person first recognizes herself in a mirror, she begins to know herself through an external reflection. The people in Loriashvili’s photographs do not simply exist as a face, but in the chaos that surrounds them, and this approach is one of the most original ways of understanding a person’s identity and life.