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Bulgaria Through the Eyes of Foreigners During the 1960s language. Its apprehension takes no time as it need not be contemplated: a single glance is enough for the information contained therein to be grasped. And this was also the aim of the authorities—to keep viewers on the surface of images, relying on their sensory and emotional perception rather than on a logical and thorough examination of facts. Those photos regarding which one is considerably more open and trusting compared to other types of illustrations would far more quickly and smoothly sink into the subconscious. This is how they became one of the most meaningful and powerful agitation and propaganda tools developed and controlled by the party. A slightly different idea of how foreigners saw Bulgaria can be found in travel guides written by foreign authors and published abroad.” Most Bulgaria guides used government-approved illustrations from the Bulgarian State Photo Archive. Some authors, however, opted to use their own pictures, thus avoiding the trap of standard and predictable imagery. What mostly impressed them was not the new, modern Bulgaria but the remains of the past and the oriental influences—all themes that socialist photography deliberately ignored: mosques, elderly men and women in national costumes, gypsies, basket makers, bear trainers, and so forth (Figs 7 and 8). Compared to this, resort life seemed unreal and insular. The Red Riviera presented itself to the world in a capitalist form (Neuburger 2013) but with the inevitable socialist content. Seemingly human but not accessible to everyone; beautiful but full of conventions and hidden traps; posing as frivolous but in fact constantly controlled and manipulated—teality and its image were dramatically inconsistent. The socialist authorities had the practice of using the credibility of photography to create illusions that easily could be turned into truths. Unnoticeably, many of the real, unattractive facts from the reality came to be replaced by their more perfect images. Socialist ideology needed faith and confidence in the realism of the photographic image. But this realism was not grounded in reality—it was something better and far more perfect than reality. It was meant to inspire people and lift the spirit. An artist adhering to the directives of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics would not reproduce the world as it was in the here and now. Every image, photographic image included, should possess something more than the ability to mechanically render the visible world; it has to also be endowed with an ideological spirit. It was not enough to merely capture the exploits of the new system with a camera, because socialist photography was valuable not only as documentation but also as a means to create and shape reality. I would say that we could compare photography, in its attempt to meet the requirements posed by socialist realism, to distorting mirrors. In front of the camera, people tend to act as if they were standing in front of a truth-telling mirror. Then all of a sudden they realize that what the mirror returns is an unreal image, showing them as something they know they are not (Eco 1986). Looking at their own portraits, they become susceptible ° For instance, Bacs 1972; Chataigneau et. al. 1968; Jepsen 1967; Johnson 1964. 543
