 My entry for LensCulture Black & White Photography Awards 2025 has been selected by the editors to be featured in the online Competition Gallery.
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 Listening Dulce Pontes, 2025 (original photo 2012) Does our perception of a particular photographic image change over time? When it is clear that the faces and objects captured in it remain unchanged. Are they evolving, or only the observer who chooses to return to them is always someone else–altered, enriched with experience, marked by time and emotion? Is there an equation between our perception of painting, pure photography, and manipulated photography - that visual work which carries the characteristics of conventional photography, yet is stripped of the objectivity of the real through the application of artistic techniques within the creative process? Does it matter whether we look at the image as its original creators or as accidental viewers who once again encounter it?
Such questions often strike me when I dig into my own photo archive, or when I decide that a photograph I once captured holds no value. In those moments, I tell myself: “I’ll let it rest.” And it has happened that a given photograph does not speak to me on the second, third, or even fourth reading. Yet after five or ten years, I may find a way to breathe life into it. Then it feels almost “new” – as if it had travelled back through time to be born again, recreated in the present. On a purely emotional level, this amalgam of perceptions is strangely captivating. Especially when you decide to breathe life into something that once seemed hopelessly drained of creative spark and potential. And even more so when you stumble upon long-forgotten shots, recall the emotion felt at the moment of capture, and experience it anew – this time enriched by the cultural and emotional layers accumulated up to the present moment. Such an experience often reminds me of the state I fall into when leafing through the pages of an old family album, recognising – or searching for – faces directly or indirectly tied to my own path, carefully archived in the trunks and cabinets of the home where I grew up. Sometimes, it is like stepping out at night onto the narrow balcony overlooking Vitosha Mountain, lighting a cigarette, and playing an album by Dulce Pontes. To drift back toward the moment of the photograph – as if carried in the belly of an invisible boat, slowly floating down the back of the Tagus river toward the ocean. Without an epilogue or clever words for a conclusion, I would simply say: for me, photography changes with time. It ripens, without my forcing it. All it needs is a few seconds to resurface before me – and to make me remember how I perceived it the very first time. There is no formula for that state of perception, but solitude and the right music as a background always help. September 2025 Among all the seasons, autumn seems to belong to the Bulgarian village naturally. During this time, the air becomes rich with fragrances - of warm hearths and charred wood, of lyutenitsa simmering on the stove, of roasting peppers, of singed feathers, and countless other scents wafting from the courtyards. This season marks the typical Balkan preparation for winter, a task the villagers undertake each year like a well-rehearsed performance, endlessly repeated yet never losing its significance.
It was around 2011, at that time of year, that this series (Eastern European Still Lifes with Roosters) was captured: a row of singed roosters, on their way to reach the final step of the village's economic cycle. These birds are meant to be displayed behind glass showcases to satisfy the daily calorie needs of an average household living by the Danube plain during the cold months. Or, to express it more poetically, less commercially and less shocking for vegans, they serve as a dose of summer, needed to help push through the winter. :) September 2025, Sofia  Mihail, 2012 / Sevlievo, Bulgaria It is one of those portraits that carries more than just a face. For a long time, it lay hidden, half-forgotten, like a relic pressed between the pages of memory. I first shared it years ago, in another blog that has since vanished, and even then, I sensed there was more to it. It was taken in 2012 on a Pinhole Day in Sevlievo, Bulgaria, when I looked at Mihail through the dim square of the Kiev viewfinder. In that fragile frame, he seemed less a friend than a vision, a figure chiselled by Michelangelo, luminous and still, suspended in a cathedral’s cool silence. At the time, Rome and Florence were distant, unreachable dreams, too costly for us to touch.
I recall my restless attempts to capture the moment: fumbling with angles, struggling with light, and experiencing a small panic of not getting it right, as I was using 3200 ISO analogue film with not much experience. There was no studio light, no light meter, only a big window with natural light coming through. And yet he stood there, calm, patient, quietly enduring my clumsy orchestration. Now, when I return to the portrait, it speaks in new voices, offering new layers of meaning. What I find most precious is not only his likeness but the nostalgia it awakens – that Sevlievo afternoon, simple and weightless, sincere as friendship, tender as the hush of a Saturday slowly unfolding. September 2025, Sofia |
Thank you for being here! In this space, I look forward to sharing thoughts and news on my passion for photography. 
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