The “big night out”, the “prom day”, or as a guy was shouting, hanging out from a car window - “Fuck you, loosers! I’ve just graduated!”, is the tradition of the extravagant proms held each year at the end of May across Bulgaria.
Thousands of graduating high-school students, aged 18 to 19, hold their proms - an expensive ritual, as a symbolic break between the carelessness of their youth and the responsibility of early adulthood.
Most of them enter the world of adulthood in a rented luxurious cars - some outrageously expensive, others ridiculously long, wearing overpriced clothes and heavily in debt. Because “this day will never come again”, as most of their parents say.
One of the emblematic gathering points in the centre of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, is in front of the largest Orthodox temple on the entire Balkan Peninsula - the Alexander Nevski Cathedral.
Students from different schools gather there daily, revving up their cars, shouting “One, two, three…” counting the school years up to twelve with hysterical joy.
Dancing to a pop-folk music, crying, hugging, drinking and taking probably their last pictures as a classmates together, before the real party begins. And as a father said to his son - “don’t come back home until the day after tomorrow”.
With each year the party becomes flashier, the dresses shorter, the boys attitude more thuggish, more and more girls proudly exposing their silicone breasts and face fillers, as presents from their parents. The cars are getting even more expensive, the music is now predominantly “chalga” or pop-folk - a folk inspired dance music with a blend of Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish and Arabic influences. Oh, and these balloons are no longer filled with helium…
And still there is something magical and surreal about that moment. I spend the last week of May, photographing these young people. I’ve deliberately chosen a more abstract and minimalistic approach, focusing on the emotions this tradition provoked in me.
I was looking for the beauty of the moment, going beyond the obvious. And there is one picture in particular that provoked me to develop this mini-series. The girl taking a selfie in front of a ridiculously long white limousine. Standing there alone, all by herself, with an open door of a car as a metaphor for the long road walked, and the unknown that will unfold in front of her after that nigh of celebrating the end of youth.
And in the end there is the hope that when we close one chapter, we open another one. And the best is yet to come.