“Great news! We managed to recover 98% of the data,” — these words from a service center employee could be the beginning of Igor Chekachkov's story about ”NA4JOPM8.” The name of the project is the serial number of a 3TB hard drive containing 250,000 photos spanning ten years, starting in 2007.

In fact, it was only possible to recover the files with significant damage: the images were superimposed on top of each other, destroyed by saturated color stripes. The tragedy, which was overcome in several stages (first by putting the drive away, then reviewing all the damaged files, and finally selecting material from them), was transformed into a series — a photo book and an exhibition.

Igor Chekachov says about his approach: “The photography that interests me most is when I react without inventing anything.” NA4JOPM8 is a kind of reaction that at first glance appears to be an intervention. The series is a reaction to loss, an attempt to accept the destruction of a ten-year archive that combined reportage photography and the most personal shots. It realized an artistic idea that Igor Chekachkov had been nurturing for several years — to connect the private and the public in a single photographic image.