“For me, everything is about feeling. I want people to feel something,” says photographer Domino Leaha of her latest project, Unfulfilled. The intimate photobook documents over a decade of relationships, tracing the lives of the artist’s closest friends, lovers and muses across London, Los Angeles, Milan and New York. “I photographed the people that I love the most,” she explains. “Some of them I’m still in touch with, others were ex-lovers, and a few of them are old friends that I don’t speak to anymore.”

The name might seem opposed to a project centred around intimate love, but the title takes its name from a period of heartbreak in Leaha’s life. “I was brokenhearted by a boyfriend at the time. When I looked at the Shakespeare sonnets I was obsessed with, the word ‘unfulfilled’ stood out to me. I realised it captured exactly what I was feeling – a sense of wanting, of requiring more than could be returned.” 

That feeling is a throughline within the project, co-existing alongside the closeness each of these relationships held. “These pictures tell the private and personal narratives of loss, heartbreak, and addiction we can all find in ourselves. Stories of longing, vanity, defiance, joy, and surrender are all part of the tragedy and grace of life, in its ever-unfulfillable nature,“ shares Leaha in the project’s foreword. Many of the subjects, she explains, were navigating their own forms of fragility – addiction, anorexia, withdrawal. “All the people in the book are broken,” she says, “and I was broken too.”

The chapters within the project are arranged by name, each with personal shots of the subjects: some are sprawled across bedsheets, others topless and sitting poolside, in one, the subject is entirely naked, splashed in an electric blue paint and thrashing around on a mattress. “I found it very interesting to take pictures of these people in different moments of their lives,” Leaha explains. “You can see the changes, the moments before and after certain events… It’s like a visual diary of intimacy,” as she recalls how one subject appears in 2018 and again in 2022 before relapsing, or how another shuttled in between squats in New York as she photographed them.

Alongside the photographs, Unfulfilled is accompanied by scans of handwritten notes and scraps of letters. “I wanted to give the audience the opportunity to see what the people think about being photographed by me,” explains Leaha. In one, her friend Melanie Blue’s hand-scrawled note signs off with “Thank you for loving my scars and invading me with your passion like a tender disease.” In another, from Martina, “I’ve crossed oceans to see you again. Love never dies.” Various others recount how they met the photographer, some writing poems recalling the magnetism that made their relationships at the time so special and others more austere.

In this way, the project reads almost like a diary – one Leaha never set out to create, drawn instead to simply capturing what surrounded her at different moments in time. While she speaks of a tendency to create cinematic shots, the subjects are often pictured in mundane spaces: cluttered bedrooms, echoing apartment hallways, or local parks. “I don’t edit anything within my work, instead I like to play with lights and composition a lot,” she explains, reinforcing the sense that what we are seeing is as close to the moment as possible. Even when removed from context, the images convey a feeling Leaha sees as central to Unfulfilled’s impact. “People don’t know me or these people I photographed,” she says, “but I hope they can still feel something close to what I felt.”

Unfulfilled will show at Quattro Milano gallery on 9th of April 2026