Bulgaria- toy camera vision

Published Categorised as Bulgaria, Photography, Travel No Comments on Bulgaria- toy camera vision

In the fuzzy zone between Christ­mas and New Year I scanned a lot of old negat­ives. I’ve recently star­ted going through them and edit­ing the photos. It’s not like travel is going to be much of an option this year, so might as well sort out all my old travel photos that I over­looked.

These were taken with a Diana toy camera on a work trip to visit a school in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2012. It wasn’t the greatest of trips- I got food pois­on­ing, was stay­ing on the edge of town in a commer­cial estate, had one class who were extremely diffi­cult (also trying the patience of their Bulgari­an teach­er), and was soon to split up with my extremely awful then boyfriend.

The outskirts of Sofia are pretty drab, but the old town is very pretty. I would prob­ably choose some­where else for a holi­day in Bulgaria though- the food was great and the people very nice, and there are much more scen­ic places in Bulgaria than Sofia. In fact a lot of people I met told me that they didn’t “really” live there. They might have a small flat in the city because their job was there and they couldn’t earn any money back home, but they considered their real home whatever village  their relat­ives had a house in, where they’d go back to as often as possible.

A multiple expos­ure of the cathed­ral. The film is some kind of Kodak slide film, cross-processed. Some­thing went wrong with these two shots of the racks of souven­ir Ortho­dox icons. It’s still just about legible what they are. This would have looked great at the right expos­ure. Still quite a lot of Commun­ist era statues around. The decor­at­ive brick paving around the cathed­ral square dramat­ic­ally stops in the middle of the street in places and we’re back in the Pothole Zone Replica medi­ev­al fres­cos on the Insti­tute of Archi­tec­ture build­ing. Also a pity this didn’t come out better.

Sofia is a contrast in that the insides of most flats are visibly very nice and well looked after inside (and the cars are all care­fully washed too), but people couldn’t give less of a shit about the street or commun­al areas. I guess if they feel they don’t “really” live there, it doesn’t seem import­ant.

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