THE BIRTH OF THE AUTHOR IN BULGARIAN

PHOTOGRAPHY(EIGHT NAMES FROM THE 80'S)

by Georgi Lozanov,
Ass. Prof. at the Faculty of Journalism, Sofia University

There are certain aesthetic grounds that allow the photographers of the
80's to be considered a truly new generation in contemporary Bulgarian
photography. With the exception of some photographers striving for their
own artistic identity, for decades previous generations had been "filling in"
the iconographic prototypes of the official ideology. These prototypes have
been withdrawn from the practice of the Soviet reportage since 1917, they
have passed the cultural and geopolitical routes of modernism and
communist Europe, finally freezing within a clich, which established at
least three tendencies in Bulgarian photography (as well as in the arts in
general) up to the 80's:
- at first, the course of its aesthetic time has been turned vice versa,
floating back to the "great time" of the revolution;
- secondly, on a rhetorical level, irrelevantly to its particular object, it used
to set forth one and the same "preliminarily given" content;
- thirdly, the individual author's identity was "nationalized" in favour of the
collective ideological identity.
Only since the end of the 70's (for reasons whose analysis would go far
beyond the frames of this presentation), in a moment when the Western
culture was obsessed with "the death of the author" - "the birth of the
author" was given in Bulgarian photography. The photographic rhetoric
rediscovered theme and style, while the aesthetic time found its present

moment. This "author's generation" established itself on the territory of art

photography, which had gained paradoxically extended rights in
"manufacturing of authorities". I say "paradoxically extended", because as
a rule this area is a thin elevated stratum within the space of photography a playing ground for eccentrics and experimenters, while photojournalism
and photo advertisement are the ones that really create and rotate names,
control the market and the public resources. Photojournalism actively
participates in the "economy of truth" and photo advertisement - in the
"economy of desires". It was most difficult for photojournalism to escape
from the above-described "revolutionary brackets". In the 80's it continued
to give an anticipating example of what Baudrillard would have called a
"media simulacra" - example of displacement of facts from images, of
"exhaustion" of truth by means of protocol visions. The photojournalist, with
a few exceptions, used to produce "packagings" - not of photographs, but
of events. Photo advertisement occupied an even worse position - it hardly
existed. Firstly, because of the anti-market and anti-consumer utopias of
the so-called socialist economy. Secondly - and mainly - because of the
suppressed auto-utopia of the so-called socialist person. Communism
exploited the individual as an impersonal material for some kind of vague
and distant "afterwards", depriving him of the "eroticism of desire and of
present moment" - the only one, which could possibly create advertisement
and revise "I want" into "I am".The totalitarian publicity "aborted" the
identity here-and-now, together with the identity within photo advertisement
and photojournalism. Thus, one's photographic identity, emigrating from
equally impossible "economy of truth" and "economy of desires", settled
down in the art photography of the 80's. The art of photography could
shelter him, for it was certainly the most peripheral public occupation and
rarely attracted the attention of the ideological centre. Sometimes its
creators complained of nobody paying interest in them, but this was
actually their greatest privilege. The author in Bulgarian photography was
born in a situation of an "overboard throw into the social world", which to a
great extent predetermined his attitude: not of an active opposition to the

socium, but of turning it back to it. This is how somebody drifting away
looks like. In this context, I will describe here eight "photographic
alienations", representing them through eight emblematic figures from
Bulgarian photography of the 80's.
ALIENATION FIRST: ESCAPE INTO THE MARGINALIA
It belongs to Jordan Yordanov and is indicative of the approach of
alienation itself. The road is the matrix of his photographs. Photography
begins since the moment you take the camera and leave your own territory
(no right to turn back, just like the political emigrants, who escaped from
the socialist camp). This is hardly a pretentious metaphor; Yordanov's
journeys do not happen in the depths of his soul, but go out, wandering
through physical and social space. They lead him to abandoned villages
and done-for pubs, to border regions and local feasts, to madhouses and
gypsy camps... His works resemble delicately poetized area explorations,
searching for a pure "anthropologic material", strong enough to block the
mechanisms of modern reflections. This doesn't mean that Yordanov is
telling myths by means of pictures. His photographic journeys rather
organize some kind of a social striptease, in which his personages undress
the marks of their cultural integrity - they are nowhere and nobody, totally
lost in their miserable surrounding, or elevated above it with the magic
causelessness of Marc Chagall's heroes.
These photographs collect proofs of the constant local failure of the project
of modernism - proofs, which are used for the purposes of a new
aesthetics. Failed modernity is as far away from both modernism and
postmodernism, as Jordan Yordanov's style - from the stiffness of the
staged photography and from the euphoria of the "decisive moment". This
is the aesthetics of the "postponed meaning" - withdrawing pieces of
cultural reality from the net of interpretation and preserving them for a
better cultural context, when it will not destroy its own subject neither in
modern ideologies, nor in postmodern boundlessness. Now Jordan
Yordanov, who succeeded in keeping his marginal social position,
continues his photographic journey in new directions - Albania, the Sofia

prison, Mongolia...
ALIENATION SECOND: A VISIT TO THE SECOND IDENTITY
Usually the invited one is Ivo Hadjimishev. He discovers the alienation in
the faces of Bulgarian culture. His portraits are classical - somewhere
between Karsch and Newman, if a point of intersection exists at all in their
approaches, regardless any psychoanalytical exercises. It is a simple
hypothesis: in the same way as, during the communist times, each
respectable writer had a "text for the locker", each respectable artist had
his "identity for the locker" - a second identity, which resisted to the public
standards acceptable for his first identity. Thus, Hadjimishev, with the care
of a "belle poque" studio photographer, and assuming the function of a
"magic assistant", gives the artist the chance to reveal himself in front of
the camera. He builds "paper scene" - on the border between public and
private, where first and second identity meet. This encounter gives a
psychological scope to the portraits, which is rapidly growing into a cultural
one. Hadjimishev's heroes are simultaneously heroes on their own - writers
"write down" on their own faces, artists "paint"... The cheese in the
mousetrap? It's in the second identity of Hadjimishev himself, which is
diversely related to the present day intellectual elite as well as going far
back to the traces of the family memory. This identification is turned into a
photographic approach, which takes the social time apart, reducing it to a
biographical one, and taking the historical moment back to "personal
stories" - as though his portraits fill up a "family album" of new Bulgarian
culture. Thus, from one photograph to another, from one face to another,
he succeeded in "reanimating" the personal authority, in broadening the
shortened horizons of public image of the time, so that the first identity
becomes insufficient. Barthes says: "In France, one is not an actor if one
has not his portrait taken at the Studio Harcourt". In the 80's Bulgaria, if an
artist has never been photographed by Ivo Hadjimishev, there is nothing
more to be added to what is known about him anyway. Today Ivo
Hadjimishev, like in the 80's, continues his search for new territories for
independent and free photojournalism. His interest in Bulgarian culture is

directed not only to its faces but also to its memorials and religious
diversity.
ALIENATION THIRD: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL OBJECT
What should you do with the advertisements nobody will ever ask you to
make? For example, you can take them to pieces exploring their initial
working mechanism, while dark funeral processions of USSR party leaders
are marching down on the TV screen. The mechanism has been created in
the toy workshops of Dadaists and surrealists, and in the 80's (probably till
nowadays) it was called a psychological automatism. Thanks to it, the inner
state, fears and complexes are objectified, they obtain shape and colour,
crawling out to the visible reality. Georgi Neykov, with a measured
psychoanalytical irony, organized them in an aesthetic performance with no
clear message. Ads, deprived from their function and meaning by
somebody; dreams, which you remember perfectly well but you are still not
able to retell... The style is obsessive, the content - evasive; "paradoxically,
style is the only thing, through which photography could be accepted as a
language" says Barthes. Intently, Neykov's photography speaks its own
language. Imagination, emancipated from the "principle of reality", inflates
the meanings of objects like balloons, until they turn into "pure" visual
signs, which finally burst. Among them, the human body, almost always
undressed, is deprived of any privileges. It is simply an object among
objects. To pretend that we are personalities with their own will and right of
choice, is definitely not ? worthier occupation than to speculate what would
happen if we weren't such. In the 80's, Neykov was passionately reading
philosophy - the motives about disintegration of personality, about
nothingness; hence, the "impossible personality" is not only reflection on
the nature of photography or society of that time, but also a reference to
Sartre, a vault from words to images. Today - for ten years actually Georgi Neykov lives in the USA. He is working in Hollywood, collecting
photographs, curating exhibitions, shooting palms, rockers' and travesties'
parties. All of them objects in which the mechanism of psychological
automatism is still ticking.