Foundation

My fascination with visual aesthetics dates back to early childhood. As a boy in Bulgaria in the early 2000s, I was drawn to drawing and admired paintings, though I was too scared to make any work. Or even try. This intrigue extended into my teenage years, where graphic design and graffiti captured my imagination, but I hesitated to use the tools given to me: my aunt gifted me a drawing tablet when I was maybe eight, and my father took me to drawing classes, but I found no solace in the process. Instead, the competition I perceived from my peers, though there hardly was any apparent such pressure, stopped me from drawing. I am deeply saddened to this day that I did not push myself harder in those years. 

To take refuge from my fears, I of course watched TV. I adored watching TV. 

Even before learning English, the images on Cartoon Network captivated me purely for their visuals and the snippets I would catch from the tales were life lessons from semi-mute heroes named Tom, Jerry, or a Samurai named Jack. I’m convinced that the Cat, the Mouse, and the Rogue are much more believable as a cohort for setting up a bad walk-in-to-a-bar joke than telling you they were my Mt. Rushmore of personal heroes who inspire me to this day.

Little did I know that this excessive, hardly controlled visual immersion would take a painful toll on my eyes, the most necessary tools I would come to rely on in my professional work.

A Shift

Let’s fast forward a bit: I quit watching cartoons, quit burning ants with a magnifying glass, and started filling up my valuable time away from my curricular debauchery with some thrilling extracurriculars. I was skateboarding in the Soviet Army Park in Sofia, researching Lisa Ann, reading critical, historically eventful literature such as Greg Heffley’s Diary, and watching my youth slowly escape through a computer screen of torrented Tarantino flicks and non-PG-rated shows about meth cooks in some faraway galaxy named Albuquerque (the phonetics of which I still struggle to make sense of). 

As a result of a deep seed planted by my father, though, I was learning English fervently and scheming my grand departure from my motherland and expected arrival in the United States of America.

By junior high, I had denied Bulgarian-language writing as a legitimate art form, moved away to Plovdiv with my father, after his second divorce, rejected sports as anything more than a waste of energy, cut off all my friends from primary school, and became an atheist. My daily attire consisted of nothing other than a strict uniform of all-black H&M basics. I had mutated into a full-fledged faux-American emo without his Visa – or a suitcase for that matter. What I did have, however, was an overseas All-American best friend named Alex and an All-American lover in Connecticut named Cameron both of whom I had the pleasure of encountering and seducing online playing Minecraft. 

To that point, I certainly did not and would never have entertained the idea of introducing myself to her as anything but the age I truly was, nor damage my vocal cords deepening my crackly semi-baritone to present myself as manlier over our romantic Skype calls. Truly. 

I also had about 23 thousand tweets to my account, now banned and discarded from X for slander and god-knows-what else. I was fourteen. Or fifteen, depending on who you asked.

At that age, in a sweltering August in 2015, I moved to New York. 

With my father, I lived in a shoebox apartment in Sunnyside, a brisk fifteen-minute jog from where I am producing this text: Astoria, Queens – A.K.A The Greatest Neighborhood for Bulgarians Abroad Besides Malibu.

Editor’s note* 

*Petar, probably mention here about having grown up upper-middle-class in the swankiest capital city district in Bulgaria Doktorskata Gradina (Doctor’s Garden), the namesake of this project, and how an awkward transition to a one-bedroom shoebox in Sunnyside, Queens hardly fit within your imaginary Sex and the City lifestyle. 

After, Petar, you should probably mention that choosing the tender age of 12 years old as the best time to depart the country with your father after an irksome divorce (due to fundamental existential differences between your mother and his person, the smallest of which seemed to be which country the family should live in) was an appropriate chess-opener in the game of your new-new life.

After the Move

My busy schedule and dynamic social life as a ninth grader in an international school in Queens attended by a wonderful cross-cultural diaspora of fellow teenage immigrant mutant aliens who were much more gifted at just about everything than myself was much too boisterous to allow for my relationship with my girlfriend in Connecticut to blossom, or for my extensive social network of Counter-Strike and Minecraft-based friendships with my group of international pals across the pond to be maintained. 

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college years later that photography (or any mildly productive activity besides smoking weed with my friends or borrowing my dad’s car when he was abroad burying my grandfather) became relevant. 

Despite this late start, my background in digital literacy, nurtured by my father’s agreement belief that computer time was healthier for a developing hippocampus than playing a sport or drawing, certainly laid a shaky, albeit intriguing foundation. If I were to estimate, I would say I spent up to 16 hours every day in front of an assortment of glowing screens, small and large. Yet, this phase lacked all signs of a creative, or any direction in my life until a pivotal change took place.

Siroko Wind Club

In 2020, I dove into the salty depths of my career in the form of a cannonball-turned-bellyflop by scoring my first shooting gig. I was the greenest, most overpaid, proudest, and most misguided photographer, videographer, and social media manager at Siroko Wind Club, a Bulgarian-owned surf school enterprise in a chunk of paradise called Limnos, Greece. To this day I am barred from entering that country legally. 

Despite owning a camera for six months— a gift from my dad, who was then a long-distance nurse of sorts to my weed habit and deranged creative persona—my honest motivation to explore photography sparked with the Lemnos job. I saw this opportunity as a gateway to windsurf for free, a chance to learn to roll cigarettes, drink Greek muscat to my heart’s desire, lounge with my fellow staff members, and make myself more than well-known to an array of mostly female surfers and swimmers. As I was more eager than the devil to impress and immerse myself in this curious sandbox realm, I self-taught photography, met my closest friends to this day, cultivated a solid weightlifting habit, started a portfolio, and began transitioning my life from automatic to manual mode. 

Upsell Yourself

My previous graphic design experience and shameless truth-embellishment skills proved invaluable during this rapid psychosomatically retroactive period. A delicate lie to the senior Siroko manager Alex that I had plenty of experience photographing, editing, and posting on social media for an American environmental nonprofit (not entirely untrue, check my LinkedIn for details) earned me the job. I leveraged my 750 euros/month, room, and surfboard included in the paycheck to check off some bucket list items including but not limited to high-fiving a surfer while photographing from a speedboat, learning to drive stick-shift, performing a complete pull-up, skinny dipping with likeminded folks, getting paid to self-teach Photoshop, waking up in a different outdoor location for nine days in a row, getting chiseled six-pack abs, and pleasing a woman on the beach. 

I still couldn’t roll a good cigarette to change my life, but I could, however, pride myself on being the guy to go to when you need someone to point out the person most likely to have weed or access to such a person within a 1.5-mile radius.

A Lapse in Judgment

My new BFF Koko (more on him later) and I got canned within a week of the one getting fired. He had gotten the boot first after his third, arguably the crescendo, act of indecent exposure, whereupon he donned a coworker’s cheetah-print bikini and performed a handstand dance in front of a terrified German family on their surfing vacation booking their first surf lesson. 

After serving our due sentences and working diligently for about a month and a half at the surf school, him as a beach boy moonlighting as DJ and chief of vibes (duties I fulfilled as an intern, uncompensated, the previous summer) and me as the former senior multimedia executive, creative director, and Koko as chief vibe-setter, we decided it was time to sail away.

Good thing Koko had his mom’s hatchback - a family heirloom vehicle not unlike that of the Weasleys - ready on diesel and sandy tar-lined tires for the escape plan.

Lessons 

After Greece, I ventured to Turkey, where two critical incidents unfolded. First, an attempt to emulate a Bulgarian firewalker resulted in a foot injury. Second, I resumed my duties to a similar capacity as I had in Greece, but on new waters. These experiences, though harsh, taught me the importance of accountability and learning from mistakes. In Turkey, I shifted focus to lifestyle photography, refining my skills away from the action of sports.

Lewis 

Back from Turkey, I enrolled in an online photography class under Michael Lewis, a renowned photographer whose mentorship would profoundly shape my path. My work in Turkey, despite its tumultuous end, showcased my versatility and caught Lewis’s attention. This validation encouraged me to delve deeper into photography, embracing it not just as a craft but as a form of storytelling.

Arts

Inspired by my experiences and the mentorship of Michael Lewis, I changed my major to Film, Photography, and Visual Arts. This decision marked a new chapter, dedicating myself to a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the prestigious Park School. My journey, filled with both achievements and missteps, underscored the value of every experience in shaping my artistic vision.

MFA

As I prepare to pursue my Master of Fine Arts in Photography, I reflect on my journey with gratitude for the lessons learned. From my early days of uninhibited visual exploration to the disciplined pursuit of photography as a profession, each phase has contributed to my growth. I stand ready to embrace the next chapter, enriched by the past and excited for the future