Oldal 541 [541]
OCR
Bulgaria Through the Eyes of Foreigners During the 1960s was still unsatisfactory—while in 1955 there were only 2,000, in 1957 the number had increased to 16,800 and to 80,000 in 1958 (Bulgaria’s Relentless Progress 1964: 1). Much more was needed to make Bulgaria a popular and fashionable tourist destination comparable to Western resorts and to ensure its attractiveness not just for holidaymakers from socialist countries. No doubt, improved services and the development of new and increasingly attractive hotels, restaurants, parks, and bars would be the steps required to attract more international guests. Of no less importance, however, would be to transform the notion foreigners had of Bulgaria as a country still seen as gloomy, frightening, and harsh. A British teacher who had visited Bulgaria for the first time in the early 1960 described this negative attitude: “I wanted to organize a school trip to your country but the parents were too scared to let their children there. They kept insisting that the children would be locked up in prison without bread or water. And so I was full of “information” when I left for here. ... My family saw me off with tears, as though they were about to bury me. ... Although I only spent 20 days in Bulgaria, I can tell about it for months. ... People in Bulgaria are marked by something peculiar, individual and unique” (Sirakov 1971: 265). In addition to socialist countries, Balkantourist opened offices in Vienna, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Washington, Beirut, Paris, London, and Brussels. These were meant to disseminate advertising materials, organize tourist groups, sell tickets, and reshape the country’s image by promoting its sunny modern resorts, beautiful nature and mountains, and ancient history. All of this would be unthinkable without high-quality, convincing pictures. But was Bulgarian photography prepared to produce such visual propaganda? In the 1950s, it adhered strictly to the directives of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, not seeking to depict the reality as it is here and now but instead offering a picture of the world as it should be. Photographers were not tempted to record simple everyday activities or just the aesthetic beauty of their objects. To conform to the spirit of socialist realism, a photographic image had to possess more than the sheer ability to mechanically reproduce the visible world; it also needed to have an ideological spirit. Only what was heroic deserved to be photographed: portraits of distinguished workers, photographic stories about heroes of labour, and impressive factories, canals, hydropower plants and all sorts of production processes (Gadjeva 2012). The country’s new priorities in the 1960s called for a new course of development in photography. To become an object of desire, Bulgaria had to be depicted as seen through the eyes of foreigners and not of the Communist party. Although landscape was essentially missing in the photography of the previous decade, now it became a major topic: sunrises and sunsets, archaeological sites, rocks, and mountain peaks. The woman, too, came to be shown differently. One of the emblems of socialism, she had been a major object of photo reporting even before (Gadjeva 2015) but never had she been beautiful, elegant, or playful. The temptress, with her luring glance, did not fit the socialist ideal, which left no room for sexuality or appeal. But in the new photographs re539
