STOYANOV Tihomir

I Give You My Face Portrait

Bulgaria

2023

With I Give You My Face Portrait, we discover a tradition rooted in young Bulgarian people until the early 1990s, which consisted in giving each other identity photographs with a message scribbled on the back. In today’s digital world, these precious memories that people used to keep in their wallets seem almost useless and obsolete, but this is precisely what gives them so much value now. This project comprises 23 portraits that Tihomir Stoyanov selected among hundreds of similar photos found at flee markets. The photos, taken between 1930 and 1991, bear witness not only to the country’s moral values and socio-historical context, but also to the aesthetic changes in portrait photography.

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With the support of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute