SMALL PICTURES GIVE AWAY BIG PICTURE

Any expat or visitor to Sofia will no longer have an excuse they did not know the name of any Bulgarian photographer. A major exhibition at the Sofia City Art Gallery, curated by a multi-person team of academics and art historians, is poised to rectify the historical injustice.

The show, entitled (in Bulgarian) More Than One Photo (which can perhaps better be be translated as There Is More to a Picture Than Meets the Eye), is divided into three parts: the beginnings of photography in the Kingdom of Bulgaria up to the arrival of the Communists in the late 1940s; Communism up to the early 1980s; the relative thaw of Glasnost and Perestroyka of the 1980s, followed by the inevitable collapse of the system in the early 1990s.

Unlike most of its neighbouring countries (notably Greece, Turkey and Romania), Bulgarians have been unused to perceiving photography as fine art. Snapshots in family albums aside, the art of photography has eschewed the art mainstream. The pre-1945 section of the More Than One Photo show seeks to explain why.

A semi-destroyed Byzantine church in Seres, Greece. Photography by Bogdan Filov, 1913

Obviously, Bulgaria has not had an Edward Weston, a Man Ray, an August Sander or an Alexander Rodchenko. But among the countless run-of-the-mill cartes postales that Bulgarian artisan photographers produced up to the Second World War there are some curious finds, which the curator of the historical section, Ivo Hadzhimishev, has unearthed. Some of those come from a private collection in New York, the Gipson archive. They include photographs taken by the Bulgarian archaeologist, Bogdan Filov, in what is today Bulgaria, Greece and North Macedonia. Just to illustrate how uneasy, controversial and multilayered the history of Bulgaria in the 20th century was, Filov, a Nazi, became prime minister and led Bulgaria into its disastrous alliance with Hitler.

Another is the work of Antip Koev Obushtarov, a photographer, who lived and worked in the town of Shipka, near Kazanlak (in Central Bulgaria). Obushtarov's work, which no one had heard anything about, was discovered, by accident, by Alexander Ivanov, a local photographer: glass plates stashed in a cardboard box  under a staircase in a crumbling house. Ivanov cleaned them up and scanned them, only to discover some of them had been irreparably damaged by dirt and mould. But – and this is a very big but – the destruction of human effort by time and the elements created perplexing, at times mesmerising imprints: yet another allegory about the complexity of art and human existence.

Undated photograph by Antip Koev Obushtarov

Predictably, the Communist section of the More Than One Photo exhibition is the least inspiring. Curated by Ekaterina Gadzheva, it brings on the work of mainly press photographers who had to comply with strict censorship and, significantly, self-censorship. The woes of the day, including accidents, disasters and the like, were a no-no for the Communist-era press, which was supposed to show smiling faces of happy workers and buxom peasant women. Ah, special attention was paid to the changing of the seasons.

Village Tavern, Tatritsa, photography by Yordan "Yuri" Yordanov, 1968

Upstairs in the Sofia City Gallery is the "modern" section, which visitors to Bulgaria will probably find the most interesting. In the late 1970s to the mid-1990s several forces were at play. For one, the Communist Party, which had cemented its stronghold on every aspect of public life in Bulgaria, exerted its iron-clad censorship on the arts. Writers, painters and musicians were subject to scrutiny. Unless they complied, they could fall out of favour – or worse. Few dared to. Curiously, the stranglehold on photography was less stringent. For one, the Communist establishment did not consider photography to be an art form and therefore did not care as much about photographers as it did about writers and film-makers. Then photographers, with very few exceptions, had learned that self-censorship was a key element of survival in a Communist society: you could get along only if you went along. Still, the slightly schizophrenic situation produced some interesting, odd and even bizarre results. Auteurs like Garo Keshishian and the late Yordan "Yuri" Yordanov were recognised back in the day, and so was another late artist, Takor Kyurdyan, who bathed his female models in developer and then wrapped them in huge emulsion-covered canvasses.

Archetype N175 by Takor Kyurdyan

Again, context is missing from the Late Communism section of the More Than One Photo exhibition. This can best be illustrated by a photo, a seemingly awkward family studio portrait, by Plovdiv photographer Sonya Stankova. At first glance what you see is your standard Communist-era couple holding a small baby between them – or, rather, trying to make a small baby look into the camera and stay still. This is a situation that everyone with a camera – or these days with a smartphone – has experienced. Stankova in the mid-1980s was a studio photographer whose main job was to take passport photos. 

From the Studio Portraits 1984-1988 series, photography by Sonya Stankova

Her models were a Turkish couple who wanted to emigrate to Turkey as a result of the euphemistically named Revival Process, a forcible Bulgarisation campaign of this country's half a million Turks whom the Communists banned from speaking Turkish and renamed with Bulgarian-sounding names. The baby between them – their own baby – needed a passport as well, and for that passport a photo was required... This photo alone, unremarkable as it is as an artefact, epitomises the tumultuous 20th century in Bulgarian politics, society, art and photography. It may be a small picture but it gives you the big picture of what life under Communism was – subliminally evoking A Pioneer, made by Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus in the 1960s, which stands for the Communist experience as such, worldwide.  

Descendants by Lotte Mihaylova, 1970s

God Forgives, I Don't. From the Labour Troops series 1983-1995. Photography by Garo Keshishian