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Born on 2.12.1949 in Sofia. He graduated from the “Julius Fucik” School of Photography and Polygraphy. In 1979, he was awarded the title of Fine Art Photography Artist by the Ministry of Culture. From 1973 to 1995, he was a photographer-editor in the editorial office of “Forek” – “Bulgarian Photography”. He has been a freelancer since 1995. He participated in many significant projects, such as the multi-volume “History of Bulgaria” of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences publishing house; “The Thracians” of “Urania” publishing house; Leipzig; “40 Years of Monumental Art in Bulgaria” and many others. He is the author of a number of advertising posters, billboards, catalogs, calendars and albums. Since 1980, he has participated in numerous solo and joint exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad. He is the winner of many awards such as the Grand Prize of the national plein-air “In the mountain of Orpheus”; the Honorary ACADEMICA Statuette; the Grand prize in the plein-air of advertising photography Smolyan and others. He is a member of the Management Board of the Association of Advertising Photographers in Bulgaria. From 2001 to 2019, he was the Chairman of the National Academy of Photography (Bulgaria). Since March 2010, he has been a photographer at the National Art Gallery. BIG PORTRAITS The exhibition deserves to be defined with a sentence reminiscent of a tongue-twister: “A photographer photographs a photographer.” Photographing colleagues, Yavor takes them out of the center of “seeing invisibility” and “throws” them into the periphery of visibility. But “throw” is more than an inaccurate word for they willingly stand in front of his camera and allow him, as in a forgotten tribal ritual, to symbolically take away their power. And here we can ask like the Little Red Riding Hood: “Yavor, why are your portraits so big?” The answer is: “Because they are paper memorials to those who, in the last twenty years, have shown the ‘heroism of seeing,'” as Susan Sontag defines photography. Personally, I would rather tear down some “monuments” and put up others, but these are empty threats, because the only way for someone to get out of the belly of the Wolf is only if one had devoured the beast first. You may wonder what Yavor and the Wolf have in common. It’s their ability to absorb others into themselves and then the “devoured” to come out not only unscathed, but even more alive than before.
