English/Dutch edition
24 pages, 41 x 30,5 cm
ISBN 978-90-812086-0-4
Photography by Vesselina Nikolaeva
Text by Frank Mulder, Bettina van Santen, Yana Buhrer Tavanier, Nina Todorova, Aleid Wolfsen and Vesselina Nikolaeva
Design by Post Studio
This paper body is a zine publication
English edition, soft cover 40 pages, 22 x 17 cm Photography by Vesselina Nikolaeva Text by Nina Todorova Design by Vesselina Nikolaeva This book is a zine publication
This book was nominated for best book at Vienna Photo Book Festival 2014
English/Dutch edition ISBN 978-90-5662-699-0 NAi Publishers Hardback, 144 pages, 20 x 24 cm Photography by Vesselina Nikolaeva Text by Frits Gierstberg, Georgi Gospodinov, Rik Suermondt and Vesselina Nikolaeva Design by Piet Gerards Ontwerpers
English/Bulgarian edition Soft cover, 138 pages, 23,5 x 16,5 cm ISBN/EAN 978-9086-90-106-7 Photography by Vesselina Nikolaeva Text by Dr. Antoniy Galabov and Vesselina Nikolaeva Edit by Bart Sorgedrager Design by Bram Nijssen
The days of the old buildings on Camera Obscura street are counted. In one year time they’ll be gone to make a place for new and modern houses eventually. But for now, this is still a post-war neighborhood, often associated with anonymity and gloominess, where people continue to cope with their environment short before parting with it. The ones who end up here cope with aging, immigration, illegality. They struggle to find work, to contain their personal and cultural integrity. I try to touch that through photographs of their domestic landscapes. Such neighborhoods are in the quiet gray areas of the city; few have seen life as it is here and soon nobody will. I strive for realistic pictures to make a personal diary of the days in this place.
One cannot talk too long about the beginning of life without drawing on one’s own beginning. With time, it becomes easier to look at it than to explain it. This is why I chose to tell this story between images and poetry. I dedicate it to my daughter, as a diary of her beginning. Time may change my memory and hers, how we feel about our own stories, loves and parents. One day, when the questions come, the book may be a crack in the darkness of her history. This work is also a response to language and all the things we cannot name. It shows how words fail to connect magic and reality, to soothe us in the turmoil of love and loss, to describe the untouchable feeling of communion with our first and last love, our family. A feeling of communion so painful and explosive, charged with life and despair in its presence and absence. As they say, life is an absurd wound. I photograph the moments of peace, after the calamities of love, after some innocence is shed and when the nights are tender again… when we are forever changed.
This project and exhibition under the title “Objectivity” is organized in partnership with the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, as part of Amnesty’s S.O.S. Europe campaign. The photographs aimed to look behind the labels of “migrant” and “refugee” by telling stories about individual people.
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