A solo art photo exhibition by Boris Kovachev, which took place in August 15 to 29, 2014 at Gallery “Plovdiv” (Plovdiv Municipal Council building), in partnership with the Union of Plovdiv Artists and under the auspices of Mr. Dimitar Atanasov – Ombudsman to the Municipality of Plovidv.

*all prints were of 40x40cm size

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Initially assigned to the author as a mere semester project, during his residency in Photography at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), the so-called “shooting of urban landscapes with a medium format camera on 6x6 negatives” inadvertently caused Boris to question this seemingly easy task at hand and its deceptive nature. After all – what exactly is an “urban landscape” when put into photographic perspective? To what extent the unique evolutionary invention, of such a geographical and administrative phenomenon as the “city”, influences the creative approach and selection of compositional elements, when it comes to photographing it? To what extent “that” – the landscape photo, of “it” – the city, boils down to mere architectural photography? To what extent it does not? How much of the “that” is mere street photography – and again – how much it ain’t? How big of an influence should the monumentality and vastness of scale of the urban environment bare in the composition of such a photograph? And does said influence exclude the deliberate participation of a human model – it’s a landscape after all, yet such is “that”, of “it”, and don’t people inhabit “its” environment, and the last anyone bothered to check those same people we used to call “models” in our photographic work…

The Author creates, for the purposes of his own exploration, a small list of illustrations on these and other questions, while capturing “urban landscapes” in his medium format b/w-negatives. For the finalization of his project Boris Kovachev has decided to utilize media, which are as unambiguous, as the task behind said semester-project. The photographs are therefore optically printed into positive transparent images on sheet film, and then a graphic reincarnation is given to each and every one of them, while being finalized with the classical gum-dichromate process. Every “urban landscape” is thus represented by a duet of sheet-film/bichromate – as different and/or convergent as “urban” and “landscape”. The “That” of the “it”.

Boris Kovachev – former NONphotographer