• Studentski Grad (Students' town). An unpleasant place, but I sometimes went there to visit friends who would try to persuade me of how awesome this place is. Apart from Jaqueline, what could possibly be awesome about Studentski Grad?
  • Roni and Poli in their first year at university. On the TV screen – Milko Kalaydzhiev, a Bulgarian pop-folk singer, is giving instructions for the night out.
  • Alex invited us over to celebrate his high school graduation. The posters of the pop-folk singers Rayna and Andrea were a surprise for everyone.
  • Elena and Eva at their first University Student Holiday celebration. Quiet is good; needless euphoria burdens you.
  • Ralitsa, Ivelina, Boris and Theo in my bed on the Student Holiday. In the morning I was told the flirting hadn’t led to anything.
  • Petko at his prom. In high school he was in the intellectuals’ circle and a computer Guru; later he got a sociology degree.
  • In the cosmos of Borimir’s grandmother’s apartment in the village of Tenevo. We would gather there in August – a company of like-minded individuals. Briefly together, once a year, isolated from the world that demanded too much of us.
Denislav Stoychev

Nineteen to Twenty-three

I graduated high school in my hometown Yambol and then I moved to Sofia and graduated from university there. Those were years of unwanted transition between the bliss years of conscious happiness, self-development, enthusiasm but also years of anxiety and troubling uncertainty. The years fly by and I can’t catch up with them while I linger inside the chaos of thoughts and manic nostalgia. It is as if life, from which I have taken a leave of absence, has never existed. The long-awaited second self-discovery combats scepticism and only my usual self-absorption, irony and mystification tendencies remain. A snapshot of Generation Y.

A storm of thoughts that had turned round hid any marker for setting out or returning; it even hid that which had made the thoughts turn round […] .
Dimitar Mihov*, “A Book of Ash”
* a close, like-minded friend.

Denislav Stoychev was born in 1992 in Yambol, Bulgaria. He received a degree in Journalism from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. He won the award for best young photojournalist in the competition “BG Press Photo” (2011 and 2013). Participant in NOOR-Nikon Masterclass in Documentary Photography in Belgrade (2015), The New York Portfolio Review sponsored by The New York Times Lens blog and the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism (2013), workshops at Bursa Photo Fest (2012) and masterclass on multimedia journalism led by Kenneth Kobre in Sofia (2011). His photographs and texts have been published in over 20 Bulgarian and international editions.