What is a place but its people? Bill Bryson once described Bulgarian women as "unquestionably the most beautiful in Europe". Most red-blooded males could not but agree, noting their long legs, curvaceous figures, high cheekbones and what Bryson referred to as their "chocolate eyes".

Given the beauty of the people, expats, in particular, can overlook rampant social problems: the poverty of the elderly baba surviving on 180 leva a month, the misery of the Roma ghettos, the plight of the "caring" professions striving to make a difference on a meagre 400 leva a month. Yet for most Bulgarians life is improving. Young people are starting to shape their own lives.

Turn back 20 years and everything was much, much worse: the detritus of a society emerging from almost half a century of communism. Sofia was like a bombed-out city, with its battered Ladas, the ever-present (and still present) socialist housing estates and desperate people queuing up for milk at 6am  – a people battling to survive.

These faces - haunted, ravaged, mournful but somehow proud - figure in Swiss photographer Doris Peter’s exhibition entitled Sofia - In Broad Daylight 1990-2001, that continues until November 29 at the Red House Centre for Culture and Debate. It’s also the subject of a magnus opus album of the same name, Peter’s first such collection.*

All Peter’s photographs are in beautiful black-and-white, taken with an old Hasselblad Swedish camera. The exhibition begins in 1990 but resembles a period long ago, perhaps because of the avoidance of colour. The wintry scenes, the grey dilapidated buildings, the long queues of bedraggled-looking Sofians huddled against the cold and starkly empty shelves, make for striking images. While people in the West were greedily guzzling bountiful supplies of food, Sofia was a place where bare essentials were missing. And yet the faces often transcend hardship, conveying a certain saintly sadness but also fierce determination. 

Peter thinks that the people have a special resilience in spite of their privations.

"They exude a dignity, a never surrender spirit - despite everything," she says.

Or is that a romanticised vision? Some say that asceticism warps people’s minds. It’s for you to decide. The photographer rarely passes judgment. Peter’s subjects challenge you to decipher them, their eyes staring out of complex faces.

Peter, a dark-haired lady with gentle features who now lives in Berlin, emphasises that, despite the surrounding poverty, she never once felt threatened or endangered. And she tells me, sounding genuinely surprised, that only one of her "subjects" ever asked for money.

A world apart
Peter arrived in Sofia in December 1990. She was a 20-year-old Zurich-based student who just wanted to go somewhere cheap. For no specific reason, she took a train to Sofia. Switzerland and Bulgaria were - and still are - worlds apart. Switzerland is pristine, almost forensically ordered. Bulgaria was not. And...heavy snort...still isn’t.

Peter chronicled every stage in her journey, beginning with the train journey itself that lasted three days and two nights. Having arrived in Sofia, she took a tram into the city centre and got out at the stop in front of the Sheraton Hotel. ‘That’s how everything began," she says. 

The Bulgaria she arrived in at the end of 1990 was experiencing a particularly troubled winter in what would be a desperate decade.

"I didn’t know much about Bulgaria, only the fact that Sofia was the name of the capital and that the country had been part of the Eastern bloc," Peter says.

She stayed a few months on her first visit, returning for extended periods throughout the 1990s. Her photographs trace the beginnings of consumer capitalism - the arrival of McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Lindt chocolate stores, the first acceptance of credit cards on Vitosha Boulevard in the mid-1990s and the first ATM machines. Her collection continues through the winter of 1997 and the disastrous Zhan Videnov government and the burgeoning recovery under successive administrations. Yet some unfathomable, oppressive weight was still hanging over the country, not just communism, but the result of numerous misplaced allegiances, perhaps?

Returning to Bulgaria again, almost 20 years on from her first visit, Peter agrees with me that it’s obvious that young Sofian women care a great deal about their appearance; they’d rather munch on twiglets and forsake lunch to be able to afford a nice jacket. The contrast between the older and younger generation is very marked.