![]() ![]() The emancipation of women is one of the great achievements that socialism proclaims to be among its own most visible and important merits to Bulgarian society. He does not stay outside, he literally “sneaks in” the image, becomes simultaneously a creator and a participant to his own works. ![]() Takor Kyurdiyan pours emulsion on naked female bodies and then prints them in full size on photographic paper. It was perfectly natural for their first “revolt” to be against the “traditional” photographic imagery that was unhesitantly replaced by unique author’s marks and they did not present reality, but interpreted it. Furthermore, they could at last try the potential of their medium in its fullness up to that moment, the medium was too strictly framed. After the political limitations were canceled, the photographers for the first time were given the opportunity to express their own individuality. It was shared between those on power and the artist who never had the last word. Authorship was collective phenomenon, a result not of personal lived experiences, but of the achievements of the whole society. Focus on the Authorįor many years, the socialist ideology overshadowed the stances “I claim” or “I present” with the impersonal “we do it”. This text is dedicated to the photographers-artists. In order for me to avoid this trap, I shall preliminary state the subject of my scholarly interest. The genre subdivisions of photography, its dissolving into small niches and its being labeled by different definitions are the reasons for everyone, who does not know what to focus on, to be doomed to failure with this art. It can be open to the visible, the form, the contour, the surface… But it can also be deep, philosophical, abstract. It is difficult to construct whatever narrative of photography due to its many-faced character. I remember how I was introduced to Taki, the chance encounters with Usha in the street – she was dressed in black and waving her long plait hanging from her otherwise cleanly shaven head, Yuri’s strange walk, the exhibitions and the conversations in Makta Gallery, the Photo Vacations, the Plovdiv Meetings… In the turbulence of the transition to democracy the layers shifted – some sank into the netherworld, others emerged on the surface… My tale is going to be told simultaneously from the position of that innocent girl, who swallowed all information with her eyes wide open, and the woman I am today who knows a lot more, but feels a lot less excitement. The peculiar breed of people who could live with no money, only for the sake of art, still existed. And that was not a consequence of my youth naivety, – in those days it was true. In the midst of the 90’s, I – eighteen or nineteen years of age by then – considered the photographers to be only artists, nothing else. I belong to the generation that saw little of the glory of its zenith, but a lot of its decline, its noble remnants. This narrative, like any other tale of Bulgarian photography of the last two decades of the 20th century, cannot be objective. ![]()
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