Falling in and then out of love is a universal experience that often brings sadness, grief and heartbreak, and with time, hope and healing. Photographer Diana Markosian used her camera lens to document these complex feelings in her new project, Replaced.

She brings the viewer on her journey of having, losing and reclaiming love, in a project that blurs documentary and fiction. “[The moments] no longer existed in the way they had, and I wanted to reclaim them,” she says. “I wanted to feel that I could exist in my own story again.”

To document their relationship, Markosian and her team worked with an actor to play her ex-partner. Each intimate image from the series, taken over three months, is a replica of an exact moment once shared with her ex and now shared between her and the actor. Her connection to him deliberately led to his being cast as her partner in the series so that the experience would feel as real as possible.

With the actor, she visited Miami, Paris, Naples, Capri and Nice, all places she had once traveled to with her ex-partner. “These locations carry an existing weight of romantic myth,” she says. “They are already shaped by cultural narratives of love, desire and idealized experience.”

She stayed at the same hotels and did the activities they had once done together, describing the experience as painful but cathartic. “It hurts so much, watching myself be replaced, watching those memories erased, and I didn’t want to live in this any more,” she says. “I’m so grateful that the project happened quickly.”

One of the most tender moments she recreates with the model appears in an image of them seated in a bathtub, holding one another with a red light glowing around them. Their vulnerability allows the viewer to reflect on a delicate moment between two people whose past love no longer exists, fostering empathy and prompting the audience to reflect on their own past relationships.

Creating these intimate photographs enabled her to contemplate her journey. “I wanted to acknowledge how these same spaces can be reoccupied,” she says, before adding:“If anything, [the project] just showed me how much I loved this person.”

For the past 16 years, Markosian has not let go of her camera, often using it to reach back and understand her past. “Art has given me a way of processing. I was studying writing, and suddenly found myself holding a camera and not wanting to let go of it; it became just a friend in my life,” she says.

She first picked up a camera at 20, during graduate school at Columbia University. After graduating with a master’s degree in journalism, she wanted to see the world, so she moved back to Moscow, Russia, where she was born. There she taught herself how to use the camera.

Today, her lens serves as a tool for reconnecting with her past life and reclaiming it as her own.

In her previous, highly regarded photo monograph Inventing My Father, she demonstrates her unique ability to reveal the unseen past through her images. Working on the book for 10 years, she depicts her journey of finding her father after 15 years of no contact, following her move to California in 1996 from Armenia, where he lives.

“Father, my previous work of the past decade, it’s all rooted in memory, and I think what’s beautiful about memory, there’s a blend of fiction, interpretation, and it’s very subjective,” she says. “So I think I love existing in that territory because none of it is really real.”

Her fascination with the blurred line between reality and interpretation takes a more literal turn in her latest project. Her photographs in Replaced reconstruct the vulnerable moments she shared with her ex-partner. Through images and diary notes, she reflects on her feelings after her former partner replaced her with someone new in his life.

The exhibition, now on view at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy, reflects her emotional state through the evolution of their partnership. The gallery space is a mockup of a hotel she once visited with her ex. The images on the walls are divided between two spaces: on one side is a pink-painted wall representing the love they shared, and on the other is a black-painted wall symbolizing the love they lost.

Reliving these moments became “slightly traumatizing” for her as she confronted the past, she says. “I wish I had a different book to make, and it wasn’t on heartbreak, and it could have been something else. I say that this is a love story because it is. But it’s not the sort of book that I wish I was making, and ultimately, art has been a way of making sense of things that haven’t felt OK in my life,” she says.

For Markosian, the purpose of the work is not to get over her ex-partner, but to heal and reflect on the past. “It’s not about being over somebody. It’s about processing,” she says. She envisions her photography helping someone else through heartbreak. “What I hope,” she says, “is that someone can recognize themselves in my work and, in doing so, begin to find their own way toward healing.”