FMP - research - archive sources - part 2

After being unsuccessful with the research in Lost Bulgaria archive, I needed an alternative. One of the main problems I encountered was that the images were very few and most of the time, impossible to re-shoot (more about that in the WIP part of the blog). 

This is how I came across the images of the Todor Slavchev Photo Archive - found the Facebook page of the project since I was looking for old images far and wide at this stage. There were amazing images of the past that most people have never seen and I was fascinated by the ideas and places that man had visited. After a few days of marveling at the images, I finally decided to look up and find out who that man was and why did he had a passion for creating images of places, events and customs at a time when most people had only one photograph taken in their lives - on their wedding day.

The home page of the website

The research on the archive website proved that Todor Slavchev was one of the first photojournalists in Bulgaria and he spent more than 60 years photographing the world around him. Throughout the years he had managed to photograph some of the most momentous events in Bulgarian history and his archive grew as time went by. 

Currently, the archive is being digitalized and curated by his grand-daughter who decided to share the archive with the world. All images are catalogued with dates and place of use, if available and arranged in categories. Yana Uzunova, that is the name of the grand-daughter, has a lot of online followers and often posts some images (watermarked, of course) in her social media profiles. That is how I found out about the archive in the first place. 

She is a very interesting woman, who puts a stress on copyright but has no problem or objections in granting access to her grandfather's images as long as copyright is stated clearly in the end result (I even wrote a few messages to her and we sort of have some kind of an on-line communication). However, as amazing as Todor Slavchev images were (really, one could learn a lot about composition, fieldwork and the like just by looking at those) they weren't of any use to me. I admire his work because of the amazing ability to shoot candid pictures that simply transport you into the time and place they had been taken, such as this one:

One of the images from the archive - as a screen grab since all images are copyright protected, The caption above it reads: S. Island, Oryahovo town, cleaning of sunflower seed. 

I admire such images and when it comes to the archive of Todor Slavchev, most of the content looks like that - images of people doing something and very rarely and architectural shot. For this reason, even though Yana Uzunova is a lovely and helpful lade, I needed something else.