Five prominent photographers from Bulgaria and abroad are taking part in the International Photography Meetings festival, which opened at Balabanov House in Plovdiv’s Old Town on Friday evening.
The 2026 edition is themed Memory and Identity, focusing on photography as a space where personal history meets collective memory and individual experience intersects with social, cultural and historical processes.
“This is the first year that the New Photographic Centre Foundation has organized the International Photography Meetings. Continuing the tradition of this long-established festival, whose curator and artistic director for many years was Nikola Lautliev, has been both difficult and a great responsibility for us. His help has been invaluable this time too,” curatorial team head Mariana Dafova said in her opening address.
She said Memory and Identity was perhaps one of the themes closest to photography, as everyone asks where they come from, how they came to be, what their past was and what their shared future will be.
“The point of this theme is not to provide answers but to ask questions. What do we remember, what do we forget, and will the images we leave behind convey the truth about us to those who see them in the future?” Dafova said.
She thanked Plovdiv Municipality for its financial support and all the institutions that had helped make the event possible. “I want to thank our lead exhibition designer Mina Kamburova and, last but not least, my team, the students and our PR officer,” she said.
The organizers described memory as a dynamic field in which recollections are reconstructed from the perspective of the present, rather than a stable archive. Photographic images preserve fragments, connect layers of time and draw attention to migration, political change, historical trauma and generational differences. “The festival asks how we shape our sense of self through what we remember and what gradually disappears,” they said.
Participants are showing their work at landmark cultural venues across the city: Balabanov House, Hindliyan House, the Mexican Art House, Plovdiv Drama Theatre and the Ivan Vazov National Library.
Bulgarian photographer and visual artist Bedros Azinyan explores people, everyday life and the cultural landscapes in which personal and collective memory take shape. His project Roots of Stone, about Armenia, is displayed at Hindliyan House in Plovdiv’s Old Town. It offers a personal account of a homeland where he was not born but whose memory and fate he carries with him. After first visiting Armenia at the age of 60, he returned twice more, discovering an ancient land marked by hardship and resilience. Ararat, khachkar cross-stones, the duduk, lavash, language and script become symbols of memory, faith and the Armenian people’s defiant spirit. The project explores the roots of identity and their place in time.
Bulgarian documentary photographer Georgi Vachev explores people, places and the dynamics of contemporary life. His series The Artist Has No Age, displayed at Plovdiv Drama Theatre, presents the artist as a presence beyond time. The portraits explore dedication to art as a way of life rather than a profession with a beginning and an end. Vachev works intuitively, outside photography’s strict rules, seeking the immediacy of an encounter, human presence and what endures beyond age.
Serbian-born artist Igor Schiller lives and works in Amsterdam. He explores cultural identity, memory and the ways childhood shapes people’s worldview. He presents Familiar Characters and Bloody Euro in the Vaulted Hall of Balabanov House in Plovdiv’s Old Town. Familiar Characters is a photographic series created in Serbia over three years. Schiller revisits his childhood, family archive and the places that shaped his identity. The boundaries between memory and fact, past and present, blur, turning childhood into a personal mythology and a space of belonging.
Bloody Euro is a short film built around family VHS footage from the 1990s. Through a fictional narrative, Schiller explores isolation, displacement and the longing for freedom, contrasting childhood innocence with the social and political realities of the adult world.
Iranian visual artist and filmmaker Maryam Firuzi explores the relationships between gender, identity, memory and sociopolitical realities. Her exhibition in the Deep Hall of Balabanov House in Plovdiv’s Old Town brings together three photographic projects addressing memory, belonging, exile and the experience of urban life. There Is Always a Distance, shown publicly for the first time, explores the artist’s life between her homeland and life abroad, freedom and a sense of loss. Reading in the Streets of Tehran turns reading into a public gesture and a dialogue with urban space, where personal presence challenges chaos and alienation. The third project, Tehran 2026, was photographed specifically for this year’s festival and offers a contemporary view of the city through Firuzi’s experience. The three series offer complementary perspectives on the relationships between personal and collective memory, identity and place. Photography becomes a means of examining the geographical, cultural and emotional distances between individuals, their homeland and the present.
Budapest-based Hungarian photographer Franciska Legát explores social issues, absurdity, humour and the shifting boundary between fiction and documentary work. Her exhibition Melancholy of Freedom, displayed at the Mexican Art House in Plovdiv’s Old Town, follows Hungarians from different generations who have left their homeland and made Berlin their new home. The project examines emigration as both a liberating and melancholic experience, driven by the search for greater opportunities and freedom. Berlin becomes a symbolic setting for tensions between East and West, past and present, belonging and a sense of loss.
The festival programme includes curator-led exhibition tours, presentations, talks and book launches at the Ivan Vazov National Library.
All exhibitions will remain open to visitors until October 31, 2026.
The event receives financial support from Plovdiv Municipality through its Culture programme, under the Festivals and Significant Events component, and forms part of the city’s 2026 cultural calendar.
Dafova is a photographer, lecturer, researcher and curator. She has taught at the Prof. Asen Diamandiev Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts since 2009, delivering courses on its Photography programme and its Graphic Design and Photography programme. She is the author of Time and Transformation in Photography and has contributed to numerous exhibitions, publications and curatorial projects. Her work focuses on contemporary developments in photographic art. She heads the curatorial team of the International Photography Meetings 2026.
The International Photography Meetings festival is one of Bulgaria’s longest-running and most established platforms for photographic art. Founded by Lautliev, a long-serving lecturer, researcher and doyen of Bulgarian photographic criticism, it has connected Bulgarian artists with the international scene for decades. It is a favoured venue for professional dialogue, sharing experience and presenting bold visual experimentation.
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