TITLE: Scars

"Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing... . It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored ... In that moment, you are connected; you have placed a phone call directly into the past and heard an answering voice." Michael Chabon

Death is not a singular event; we die by thousands of cuts instead. The series re-thinks scars not as ruptures of the flesh, but as our living memories. Scars are the visible side of what we have been through; we know we've been alive because of the scars we bear on our bodies and our souls. Our scars connect us with our past and have the power to take us back to long-lost moments ages ago when we were different people.

Like old, black and white family photos, the scars, the small disfigurements we and everything in the world bears upon itself, make us reminisce over times, and places, and people, we will never see again; about moments that will never repeat themselves. Scars signify our personality; like fingertips, there are no two people with exactly the same scars.

The series treats scars metaphorically and looks for them beyond the obvious and beyond the human body. It is entropy that rules the world, and erosion is the law all things obey. 'Scars' looks for the subtle signs of these forces and tries to portrait them nostalgically and melanchonically, like the "emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing".

AUTHOR: Ivaylo Yorgov (Bulgaria)

Ivaylo is an amateur photographer working in black and white, looking to explore the subtle beauty in the shapes and textures that surround us. He is interested in that which we often overlook; in the scars we assemble while we live; in the trails we leave behind; in the seemingly small details that create our world. His images are nostalgic, melancholic, calm - images created to hint, rather than strike, to evoke memories rather than create impressions. Ivaylo's images are introspective and designed to connect the outer world with our inner selves, lying below the hustle of daily live. Like memories from a distant past, his photographs try to touch the gentle, soft, and delicate aspects of ourselves we often forget. By reminding us about the dark beauty of the world, Ivaylo aims to show a realistically human view of the world in which we are not dichotomically good or bad but possess both the best and the worst of the world.