Description
It is one thing to look at the beauty of the gigantic and exotic Brazilian city of Manaus as a tourist; it is quite another to go to him as a pilgrim, in search of salvation and harbor, to choose to be his inhabitant. In both cases, however, the journey is long and much of it passes by water. Water - this old symbol of the road and salvation - is a major element in the works of Bulgarian photographer Rumen Koynov, who lives in Manaus. Perhaps this is why it seems appropriate to me that this album begins with a series of lyrical waterscapes.
Like the paintings of The Flood and the Third Day of Creation by Hieronymus Bosch, many of Rumen Koynov's compositionally clearer photographs are saturated with an almost ascetic sense of all-encompassing loneliness.
Water is really everywhere in the Amazon - it conquers, penetrates, seeps - it is everything. . . or just about anything. It is the air you can drown in, and the thin but dense, cocoon-like moist shell that surrounds every surface. It even rules over human movements, relentlessly slowing them down in the blazing rays of the sun. It is easy to see that Rumen Koynov is in love with everything that is carried by water ...
Still, I think if Rumen's photographs were colorful, they could hardly convey the grandeur of this liquid nature. The reason, at least in part, is the intensity of the light near the Equator, which, broken through the very humid air and enhanced by the specific additional radiation of the wet surfaces, falsifies the eye, sometimes blurring the view and sometimes blinding it.
Elitsa L. Bachvarova