"Everyone Has a Story"

Stolipinovo is one of the largest Roma neighborhoods in Europe and a part of Plovdiv, European Capital of Culture in 2019. Between the high apartment buildings constructed during the communist period are small dwellings and improvised houses. It is home to different Roma communities, with their own languages, religions, traditions and individual stories.

I began photographing Stolipinovo not simply as a neighborhood, but as a community that is often viewed from outside through prejudice and stereotypes. During my visits, I tried to move beyond these generalizations and concentrate on the people themselves—their homes, families, daily lives and personal relationships. This approach eventually became the exhibition “Everyone Has a Story.”

The exhibition was first presented at Plovdiv University Paisii Hilendarski from 22 April to 31 May 2019. It subsequently became part of a wider Bulgarian academic project connected with the National Scientific Program “Cultural and Historical Heritage, National Memory and Social Development.” The program brought together six academic institutions: Sofia University, Plovdiv University, Shumen University, Southwest University, Technical University and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Through this collaboration, the exhibition did not remain only in Plovdiv. It travelled to different parts of Bulgaria and reached audiences within the participating academic communities. For me, this gave the work another dimension. Photographs that had begun with encounters in the streets and homes of Stolipinovo became part of a broader conversation about cultural diversity, social memory and the way we look at communities different from our own.

The title “Everyone Has a Story” expresses what I wanted these photographs to say. Behind every label—Roma, minority, immigrant, poor, outsider—there is first of all an individual, a family and a life with its own history. My purpose was not to explain Stolipinovo from the outside, but to allow some of those individual lives to become visible through photography.