I was born in a Bulgarian city close to the Black Sea coast. Some of the most memorable times of my childhood are the summer times that the whole family used to spend in a small hut on the beach. And the highlight had always been the stories my grandpa used to tell us. He was a slightly disabled actor and had mesmerizing stories about the headless horses, the children, the sea…This intimacy with Black Sea must have been engraved in my soul so deep that even decades after we moved to Turkey, I keep on taking shelter on its coast. I am living in Istanbul, a mega-city of millions of estranged people. Fortunately, it is close to the Black Sea coast, which offers me a window to breath whenever I feel drowning. <More>
The idea of making a series has emerged when I decided to visit my birth-land with my family after 25 years. The initial idea quickly flourished into a series about the Black Sea coast and its people. Compared to its bigger sister Mediterranean, the Black Sea has been largely overlooked.
I travelled mostly on the southern coast from Bulgaria to Georgia. On my way from my native Bulgaria to Georgia, I searched for the feeling of these past summers when my grandfather told me all these stories. The resulting images reveal a fusion of my memoirs with contemporary scenes. The scenes and people I framed, often served as reflections of my fade dreams and fantasies in the forgotten lands, the lands that host multitude of different views and life styles, the lands that are under the threat of untamed development and active demographic transformation. Yet, the sea is the pot that blends the people of the Black Sea basin. I framed daily activities of people, simple and fragile events along the coast, delving into multiple cultural layers of the region with a touch of personal mysticism and spirituality. <Less>
