FMP - final - Contacting galleries

From the very start of my education at Falmouth, I knew that I want to have an exhibition - the reasons ranging from wanting to be like the "famous" photographers to having my work showcased. At first, it didn't look like a hard thing to do - you have a collection of images, have them printed out and find a place to showcase them. 

The reality, however, proved to be way different from that. Problem one was caused by the actual images. When I started studying at Falmouth, I had an exact idea of what I want to showcase - and that was my travel images I took throughout these two years while I was pursuing my MA. I have some really interesting and appealing image in my archive which, however, proved to be "inconsistent" and not connected to one another enough to form a "coherent body of work" as my favourite phrase of each and every WIP brief goes. I love those images and I will certainly have an exhibition of them alone BUT not for Falmouth, it seems. 

One of the images I love deemed "banal" by my tutors. It may be banal, I don't deny that, since it is a simple sunrise at the sea BUT to me it is really important (and one of the rare occasions when I managed to capture a sunrise). 

Hence, I needed to compile a whole new lot of images for my FMP - mainly because I am not entirely pleased with the ones I did for the previous modules. In each WIP there are a few images I really love but there are also the others which are not that good (or not that appealing) and I would not want to have printed and showcased as samples of my work outside the Falmouth grading system. 

Besides, for an exhibition to be successful in Bulgaria, it has to somewhat comply to the Bulgarian standards of what is beautiful. I have mentioned it countless times here in the CRJ that what British people think is beautiful is deemed "plain" and "uninteresting" in Eastern Europe - this may be an overgeneralization but it is really close to the truth. 

So at the beginning of the FMP module I needed something that would be novel, interesting ans challenging to me to shoot, interesting for the viewer and above all "a coherent body of work". That is how I came up with the re-photography idea. 

The task seemed quite easy at first glance, but after a few attempts to do things right, it dawned on me that things will not go as quick as I would like them to do so. That led to problem two - how to find a gallery. 

There are quite a lot of galleries in Sofia - both big and small - but the main problem with that is that most of the they are over-occupied since practically anyone in Bulgaria would love to have their work showcased in the capital. I understand that, it is quite logical, but it makes life (and professional career) of photographers born and living in the capital a struggle. 

There are a few famous and good galleries in Sofia that everyone who's anyone uses. Problem with them was with the money. As much as I wanted to have my work showcased there, there was the rent case since almost all of those galleries wanted quite the high rent due to high demand of that exhibition space. Plus, getting that prime spot requires not only money but the right connections, which I, at 27. didn't exactly have. Some colleagues advised me to check dates in advance as I may be able to showcase free of charge, in between the big paid exhibitions. However, the amount of time it took me to create the final images and the "exhibition season" (most photographers in Bulgaria, for some reason I don't understand, have their exhibitions opened in spring) prevented me from doing so. Had I agreed, I would have had only three days of exhibition and I thought that this is too little for all that effort I took. 

The galleries that were OK with a longer period of showcasing my work, wanted a rent I was a bit reluctant to pay (after all, this is my first exhibition and I don't really have a huge budget for it, at least not as huge as I would love to).