site.btaShy Intimacy Exhibition in Kazanlak Presents Lotte Michailova's Work

An exhibition entitled Shy Intimacy, presenting works by photographer Lotte Michailova, opened in in the Nenko Balkanski House-Museum in Kazanlak on Thursday on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. The exhibition was created by the team of the PhotoFabrika Foundation. 

"This is an exhibition that presents footage from Lotte Michailova's archive, from the family archive, from her son and preserved footage from Germany, where she spent the last years of her life," Poli Zaharieva, one of the organizers of the exhibition, told BTA. She noted that most of them present intimate, family moments that transport the viewers back to certain times, as if to discover themselves.

A large part of Lotte Michailova's ouvre also includes nature shots, which can also be seen in the exhibition.

Zaharieva noted that Shy Intimacy has traveled to many places in Bulgaria and is the first representative exhibition that preserves so many different parts of the author's work.

It is the exhibition is the event that has aroused the greatest interest among all events organized by the PhotoFabrika Foundation, she added.

"As a researcher, I can categorically say that Lotte Michailova is a name that we will have to research and examine, because the archives of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, and not only, still hold hundreds of unopened pages waiting to be read (...)," said Dr. Plamen Petrov, one of the organzers of the exhibition. He pointed out that the works of Michailova were a turning point in the 1960s, which helped Bulgarian photography grow to a very high level.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, which selects over 90 frames from the author's personal archive, created between the 1960s and 1980s, 60 of which are included in the current exhibition. 

The exhibition will remain at the Nenko Balkanski House-Museum in Kazanlak until October 12. 

Lotte Michailova was born on November 27, 1925 in Pernik, to a family of a German and a Bulgarian. She lived in Germany as a child, but graduated from high school in Bulgaria. She remained to live and work in the country, starting as a photographer in the photography department of the Sofia Municipality. During this time, she completed courses in Film and Photo Techniques, as well as in Scientific Photography. She worked as a photographer at the Bulgarian Cinematography and the Boyana Feature Film Studio. Her photograph entitled Nude at the second National Exhibition of Art Photography in 1963 was a cause for a clash between innovators and the conservative jury. Her work has been honored with a total of 44 awards from national and international photo exhibitions.