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120 Anelia Kassabova mass media. Such photographs were successfully displayed at exhibitions and popularized through books, magazines, and albums, as well as reproduced in large guantities and sold as picture postcards (ill. 32 and 47). Bulgarian sovereigns Ferdinand I and Boris III (from the Western aristocracy) wanted to be photographed in Bulgarian folk costumes as a sign of recognition and affiliation to the Bulgarian but also as something exotic. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it also became fashionable for the upper classes to be photographed in folk dresses (see ills. 43, 44, 46). There was pressure in conforming to dominant ideology and representational adherence and also pressure imposed by the photographer’s studio, with its props and the resulting photo-text with its typologies. Not only the studios of Ivan and Dimitar Karastoyanov, but all renowned studios had to have a selection of traditional Bulgarian clothes. As a nonverbal means of communication, photography can surmount the barriers of language and communicate through visual symbols. With a strong emotional impact, photographs have been used in attempts to sway public opinion, to bring about desirable changes. In contrast to a town in which one saw the “foreign influences” and changes, it was underlined that “only the peasants have remained real Bulgarians” (Zahariev 1867). This went with an idealization of the moral qualities of “the peasant” in general. The absence of an aristocracy was reassessed as a virtue; in the rural family with its customs and traditions, “a people was seen who had lost by the historical development its kings and aristocrats, but who [had] preserved its natural folklore in original cleanliness. One discovers a people that is not divided into ‘society’ and ‘people’, but forms a whole organism, which has the same clothing on top and below” (Karavelov 1905: 5-6). The stressing of the social unity coincided with a time in which social differentiation deepened. The political and ideological goal of homogenizing the nation in order to support nation building and modernization was conducting. This necessarily led to a simplification of a few highly emotionally loaded symbols, which encompassed increasingly ethnically loaded customs, traditions, and national costumes. Rural life was pressed in a canon of codes, which could preserve the nation in an ethnically static and pure state. Through progressive educational activity and wide popularization, the aim was to create and strengthen a national community, by way of internalizing the propagated values, which should lead to the self-confidence of individuals and groups. Photography was utilized to be a guardian of Bulgarianhood. ‘The visual representation of Bulgarianhood included symbols of both urban lifestyle and folk life. It could be interpreted as an expression of an “identity-in-between” but also as a visual concept of a deep-rooted modern identity. Photography is always about public display. The Karastoyanovs’ portfolio is of great importance for the idealization of a traditional peasant way of life at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Because the main function of the photographs was harmonization, representation, and com
