What transition?

Sometimes we have to stop to realise this was 1990. Perhaps it would be premature to describe this as "the transition period". A more appropriate description would be the entr’acte between the fall of the Todor Zhivkov regime and the march towards market forces that really began with the election of Kostov’s government in 1997. Recent debates on Bulgarian television have reached a similar conclusion. How can you talk of "transition" when the same party ran the show? In 1990, the previous ruling Communist government had been re-elected, renamed the socialist party, albeit with serious doubts about fraud. (Commentators later noted that about half a million votes had been unaccounted for).

Seeing the photos certainly makes the troubles of the west seem trivial. In the UK in 1990 we were demonstrating over something called the poll tax; this seems like the merest bagatelle at the side of the empty grocery stores, desolate save for their jars of stuffed pickles. This is, in fact, a recurring motif in Peter’s photographs - the solitary jars of conserved tomatoes or gherkins lining otherwise empty shelves. Peter even photographs food ration stamps that Bulgarians were forced to carry during that winter of 1990-91. The pitifully crippled beggars on the now elegant Vitosha Boulevard tell a harrowing story of their own.

The shortages led to mass protest vigils in Alexander Battenberg Square. Sometimes it takes some suspension of disbelief to accept that this was a European country when you see people queuing for essentials on Vitosha, Rakovski and Graf Ignatiev streets. When I mention this to my wife she replies: "but this isn’t really Europe, this is the Balkans..."

Some may take exception to Peter’s choice of subjects. A few critics regret that - in their view - Peter focused exclusively on the downside. She photographed "ordinary" people in the street. And since "ordinary people in the street" (and here the phrase is used literally) would - perforce - tend to be the forsaken, the outcasts or simply those hit hardest by austerity, these are the people who figure. Gypsies appear in many photos - children collecting scrap metal, or, poignantly, two young boys sniffing glue outside the Sheraton Hotel (Peter tells me, ironically, that this particular photograph was taken on what is now the site of a Dolce Gabbana store!) and older people on the streets selling cabbage, flowers and popcorn as well as the street peddlars - a shoeshine man, a man with a pair of weighing scales and a raincover vendor. Yet these are the people Peter is interested in. After all, the rich hog the limelight every day.


*Sofia In Broad Daylight 1990-2001, by Doris Peter, runs until November 29 at the Red House Centre for Culture and Debate, 15 Lyuben Karavelov Street.
Tel: 02/988 81 88, 02/986 44 16

The hardcover 356-page book has 200 photographs and is written in German, English and Bulgarian. It also contains contemporary interviews with Sofians and an analysis of events covered during the period concerned. The book can be ordered through www.ulpi.com