The Calling of The Steppes

The Calling of The Steppes is both a tribute and an elegy—a work that holds memory, longing, and the irrevocable presence of absence. It is an intimate dialogue between a daughter and the landscapes that hold her father’s memories and call her.

Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and shaped by a life moving across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the United States, Bobrova returned to the landscapes that once held her family; exploring how places carry memory, and absence.

“The project began in 2021 as I traveled between the United States and Kazakhstan; seeking a dialogue between nostalgia and the present. I was shooting my new ongoing photo series in collaboration with my papa. Throughout life, my parents, my sister and I spent a lot of our time on the road; traveling. My parents always had a tendency of sharing family history while we were on the road. Since childhood, going through family archives, was as mundane as making breakfast in the morning. When this project began, my papa and I revisited sites from ancestral stories across seasons; listening to how landscapes remember what we cannot.

In the spring of 2025 a horrendous tragedy changed the trajectory of my work, my papa’s sudden passing. My first conscious loss of a loved one and my best friend struck me with the silence so profound it reshaped everything I had been building my whole life. The project, once expansive, has turned inward—anchored now in one country, and one terrain: Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a country where my ancestors built their lives, and where my own grief has taken root.

I weave my papa's archival photographs with my own photographs, creating a fragile braid of memory, and loss. This process is a tender exploration of how grief, present, and past intertwine. These images form a conversation between papa and a daughter, past and present, what endures and what vanishes."