The series RUPTURE focuses on the urban landscape in Bulgaria 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the beginning of a prolonged "post-communist", "transitional" period for the country. The premise of the series is that metaphors about Bulgaria consistently visualize themselves in its public and semi-public spaces, whose ownership, status and responsibility of guardianship are just as vague as the larger identity of the country and its people.

The places photographed are in many respects borderline, existing in a variable state of limbo: between private and public property, between dereliction and livability, and between scorn and neglect. The photographer facing them is himself an "in-between person": born and bred in Bulgaria until age 28, then self-exiled and naturalized in the United States, while in the process gradually abandoning allegiance to any one country.

The 30 cityscapes in the series were photographed between 2008 and 2011 with a 35 mm camera used in a slow tripod mode. In the making of these images I avoided people in the picture frame, while consistently searching for the flow of human spirit through inanimate matter.

©Rafaelo Kazakov, 2011