site.btaGaro Keshishian’s Construction Corps Photo Exhibition to Be Displayed in Sofia

Ninety-two photographs taken between 1983 and 1995 by photographer Garo Keshishian will be part of an exhibition of his, entitled Construction Corps. The artworks will be put on display on December 5 at the Synthesis gallery in Sofia. The event will be attended by Keshishian himself, as well as by photographer and collector Rafaelo Kazakov and Assoc. Prof. Georgi Lozanov, Editor-in-Chief of the Bulgarian News Agency's LIK magazine.

Nadezhda Pavlova is the curator of the exhibition which will be accessible to the public until February 15, 2025.

The organizers say that Keshishian's Construction Corps photo exhibition is among the most significant long-term documentary studies in Bulgarian photography. The exhibition raises the issue of a rarely commented state practice in the near past - conscription in Bulgaria. Through his photographs, the artist creates a space for empathy and personal connection with the workers, revealing the human side of their daily lives.

"I put a lot of efforts to gain the trust of the guys I was shooting. It was this trust that allowed me to recreate their daily struggle to preserve the human in them despite the inhuman living and working conditions. The blatant ethnic discrimination that is embedded in the communist and post-communist construction corps in Bulgaria is evident within [the photographs]. But the strongest driving force that kept me coming back to them with my camera was my compassion for these boys whose only faults were the time and place in which they were born," Keshishian explained.

The photographs in the exhibition have been printed after restoration of their original negatives by Viktor Gerasimov. They have been preserved thanks to Kazakov - a friend of Keshishian.

Garo Keshishian was born in 1946 in Varna (on the Black Sea), where he has lived and worked ever since. He became an active photographer in 1973. He has been awarded a number of prestigious Bulgarian and international awards and participated in dozens of exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad. In 1988, a slide film collection of his was screened at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in Arles, and in 1989 he received an invitation to present his works at the Shadai Gallery in Tokyo.

In 1990, American curators Wendy Watriss and Frederick Baldwin included photographs by Keshishian in an exhibition of Bulgarian artists presented at the third edition of the FotoFest festival in Houston. In the same year, photographs from the Construction Corps series were included by Charles-Henri Favreau, director of the Musée de l'Élysée - Lausanne, in an exhibition entitled L'année de l'est. Un air de liberté, in which four other Bulgarian photographers participated, along with names such as Josef Koudelka, Tomasz Tomaszewski, Sibylle Bergemann, Carl De Keyzer, Raymond Depardon, among others.

Garo Keshishian's works are part of the collections of various institutions, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée de l'Élysée, as well as part of many private collections.