Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Conceptual photography »
Gold Medal
“You are a man. Pull yourself together.” my father used to repeat.
After the Fathers is a photographic series that examines masculinity as an inherited model of behaviour. The man is not presented as an individual portrait but as a system of characteristics operating through habit.
The project explores the collision between traditional beliefs and emerging liberal ideas within the context of Bulgarian society, where these questions rarely receive sustained public attention. Contrary to expectations after the ideological shift of the 1990s, certain social roles have often remained frozen rather than transformed.
Masculinity is approached not as identity but as practice, absorbed early through unwritten rules transmitted within the family, school and everyday life, including emotional restraint, fear of failure and the refusal to admit vulnerability. Behaviour is internalised through the body rather than explained.
The work observes how these inherited gestures continue to reproduce themselves within broader social, economic and political structures, making visible tensions that remain unresolved and open to interpretation.
