In the meantime

Belene, April 2026. Photo: Roberta Koleva Echoes of a Nuclear Dream is a zine and photo series that emerges from ethnographic fieldwork in Belene, a Bulgarian Danube town shaped by the unfinished nuclear power plant repeatedly suspended and revived across decades. The photographs follow ordinary landscapes where postponed futures continue to leave material traces — abandoned workers’ housing blocks, infrastructural fragments, gardens, pathways, quieter forms of reuse, and new promises entering old spaces. The work asks what remains when the future never fully arrives, yet never entirely disappears. You can have a look at the whole zine below . If you are using a phone, for a better view, please use portrait mode. --- Alternative viewer:

  #VisualAnthro Diaries 7 (Week 9) In the discussions in my visual anthropology class so far, we have been engaging with the topic of filmmaking and anthropology’s relationship to social ‘reality’ from different perspectives. Week 9 continued these discussions, focusing on the position from which reality is shown. Here, the questions were no longer only how images are constructed , but who is speaking, from where, and with what consequences . If observational cinema tried to step back, and montage revealed construction, the subjective turn, which started with cinema verité and the focus on participation (week 7), brought the filmmaker decisively back into the frame. At first, this might seem like a solution, because if the problem of documentary was its claim to objectivity, then doesn’t making the author visible, acknowledging subjectivity, voice, and position, appear as an ethical and methodological correction? In class, we had quite a lively discussion, especially regardin...

  #VisualAnthro Diaries 6 You need to tell lies to tell the truth. A thought that began with last week’s discussion on observational cinema and became even clearer with this week discussion on Dziga Vertov’s legacy, among which Man with a Movie Camera (1929). If in observational cinema the problem was how to see without imposing too much, here the question becomes what if film does not simply observe reality, but actively produces it? What if the “real” on screen is always already constructed? And what if, most importantly, the camera sees better than the ethnographic gaze alone – not only in what it captures, but in how it makes reality visible. The lie of documentaries As Vaughan discusses, what defines documentary is a set of conventions that persuade us to accept what we see is truthful, even though its meaning is always constructed.  In "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity," (1999) he explores the fundamental tension in documentary filmmaking between film as a photograph...

  #VisualAnthro Diaries 5 Week 5’s focus on observational cinema added another layer to the discussions on the different claims to “reality” we have been having so far in the visual anthropology class. Again, the central questions were: how do we see, and what are the most appropriate ways of seeing and observing? Is mere observation, without explicit interpretation, a passive act, or does it already come with specific arguments and assumptions? These questions are clearly connected to older debates in anthropology and cinema around “objectivity,” and to the idea that social life can be observed and made comprehensible through the camera, with the camera imagined as a particularly powerful, almost objective observer. However, the observational turn in cinema complicated these questions because, in the 1960s, it made specific claims about how ‘reality’ should be approached. With lighter cameras and synchronous sound, filmmakers could leave the fixed position of earlier documen...

Visual Anthropology Diaries #4   What is a photograph? A representation? A trace? A code? A wound? A terrain of power relations? A relation?   In 2022, I shot on film for the first time. My first roll was taken in Burgas, one of Bulgaria’s largest cities on the Black Sea coast, shaped by maritime labour, the surrounding lakes and the everyday choreography of its harbour. I photographed myself, fishermen, ships and people across streets, carrying the roll around with a mix of excitement and anxiety. With film, you don’t immediately see what you’ve done and there is this productive gap of uncertainty between the act when you capture the ‘moment’ and the result. When the scans finally arrived, I opened them the way you open a letter you have been waiting for, and slightly afraid of what will be inside. I moved through the frames quickly, with relief and disbelief that there was actually something there, and then I stopped. In one of the photographs, there we...

(Visual Anthropology Diaries #3) Google Search: “Nuclear energy old posters” If you search for “nuclear [old] energy posters” on Google, you will soon find yourself in an endless spiral of atoms dancing around hundreds of slogans: from such promising technological progress and labour prosperity, though sinister ones condemning nuclear energy and its “victims”, to assuring there’s a “peaceful atomic” future awaiting, and contemporary AI-designed such praising the atomic energy as “cleaner” and “safer”. It’s strangely addictive to pick one object and follow how the images it produces, and the images produced for it, changed across time and space. This is the task I have for this week for my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic filmmaking class at CEU. So I thought, why not use this opportunity to look at different representations of how this one peculiar substance that has always fascinated me –  nuclear energy – has travelled through visual culture in the past and present, in the Un...