VETERANS OF CULTURE

2001

Pigment prints on Hahnemuehle Baryta paper, 60x60 cm.

Edition of 3+1

“In their portrait photographs, Missirkov & Bogdanov continuously go back to the “glory and drama” of the single human being. The cycle Veterans of Culture is dedicated to elderly people living in a retirement house, all of them divorcees or survivors of spouses. All their lives, they had worked in the field of culture, had enjoyed various degrees of success, had had their ups and downs, and had actually lived through and “survived” a long period of history of the world and their country Bulgaria that is generally referred to as totalitarianism. This same period is often thought of as unpleasant, to say the least, by popular media and opinion, however to these people it was the time of their youth.

The warmth of the work comes from the combination of excerpts from talks between the artists and their models, and from the direct gaze of the camera. In this context the variety of life experience merges with the variety of visual appeal and the entire texture of the past is visible. The telling irony of the cycle is the realization that the ex-heroes of socialist culture are now reduced to TV soap opera watchers. At best they are matching their memories of the (un)realized promises of the past against the glossy screen images of what their great grand children might be able to enjoy “once upon a future”…”

Yara Boubnova, ICA-Sofia