VENETA ZAHARIEVA

摘要

As a young girl growing up in Sofia, Bulgaria, Veneta Zaharieva intuited her father's courtly manner as a kind of secret code by which he communicated with neighbors during the country's socialist era. She also sensed the dislocation he felt arising from his inability to reconcile memories of an aristocratic childhood with the political realities of the day. Now a grown woman living in San Francisco, Zaharieva creates complicated photographs that channel her own sense of cultural alienation through a kind of visual code that resists easy interpretation. With City Fairytales, a series of urban landscapes taken in Sofia and San Francisco, Zaharieva transcends objective representations with an in-camera layering technique that opens routes to deeper, hidden layers of meaning. "For many people, reality is only about what they can see or touch," she says. "But I don't see reality in such absolute terms. Einstein's theory of relativity proved that just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I believe in the subconscious world and the great power within it. In my images I constantly provoke the conscious part of the mind, so that the subconscious one arises and expresses itself. Layering allows me to suggest this kind of 'invisible' reality."