Portfolios Archive - Page 3 of 6 - Vesselina Nikolaeva

School Nr 7

Do people in the latter days of state transition stay connected to a past of which they have no memories and of which the last traces slowly disappear? School nr. 7 is a documentary of the first generation after the Cold War in Bulgaria and depicts growing up in an adolescent society. The country is a place, where the old stereotypes have disappeared, but are not jet replaced by new ones. A place, where young people are facing a future of unlimited possibilities to build the life they want for themselves, but where proper guidance is lacking. Contrary to western societies that are characterized by continuity and where children can therefore easily take their parents as an example to follow, in-country like Bulgarian, having experienced dramatical changes after the downfall of Communism, this is impossible. These fragile individuals have to transcend their material reality in order to find a passage from a world non-existent into a world still in the making.

Baba

My great-grandmother was born in 1902 and died in 2004. She lived a life too long, too wise, too sad. In the last two years of her life, I searched for the woman she was. What kept her going; what miracle protected her from illness in time of no medicine, from bombs in time of war, from repression in times of totalitarianism, from the madness in the face of loss – from her mother as an infant until her youngest child. Her portraits are memories, history at its fullest, life out of space, disembodied femininity, and longing for the material. I realize now that I have photographed her as the embodiment of sovereignty. It shows a century of the history of a woman and sets it against the history of a nation in the same period.

1300 grams

1300 grams is a project in support of the campaign of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the foundation Poppies for Mary “Our children are not organic waste”.
In Bulgaria, all stillborn or died shortly after birth babies immediately become the property of the hospital, which burns them as ” organic waste”, along with other hospital waste. Parents cannot get an urn with the ashes of their baby or a burial place to visit – a very important point in the grieving process.
The portraits I took were initiated by my faith about the natural right of parents to part with their children in a humane and dignified manner.

1300 grams

SNS Bank – See how the Dutch look after your investment anytime.

SNS Bank

See how the Dutch look after your investment anytime.

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Objectivity for Amnesty International

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.

“This project is about people,” says renowned Bulgarian photographer Vesselina Nikolaeva. “It aims to tell their stories by showing an object of importance they brought from home. But not everyone had an object to show, having left everything behind, or given everything to the smugglers. Everything. But not their face. And not their voice. The people in these photographs are refugees. But first they are people.”

Sleeping Gold under the Red Mountain

Sleeping Gold under the Red Mountain (2010)

Rosia Montana is 2500 years old village in the mountains of western Romania, and the site of gold deposits believe to be the largest in all of Europe. This area has been mined for at least two millennia, from the time of Caesar to the days of Ceausescu, and owes its name – ‘red mountain’ – to the streams of water turned red from toxic runoff produced by 2000 years of underfunded/uncontrolled gold mining. The hills, valleys, and rivers of Rosia Montana are in deplorable and dangerous conditions – ridden with arsenic, zinc, and iron well above the legal limits, caused by the acid rock drainage from two millennia of mining. The Romanian Government has designated the area as a ‘Disadvantaged Zone’ due to the high unemployment.
Who will restore those lands if not Gabriel with its legally binding commitment to thorough environmental reclamation? A private gold mining operation, promising to ‘clean up the mess’ in exchange for the indicated recourses of 14.6 million ounces of gold and 64.9 million ounces of silver.

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Laptop

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