Boriana Pandova

The idea for this project was pleasingly simple. Boryana Pandova asked friends and strangers to take out of their empty pockets whatever they could find in them. The very contradiction of her demand (empty your empty pockets!) turned into the cause of many interesting effects: from the perfectly natural reaction: “But I have nothing in my pockets. Look!”; to the warier “There’s this – it’s only rubbish!”; to a series of macro photographs, which unexpectedly transformed the insignificant pieces of “only rubbish” into living things and recognizable shapes. The new technology of the last century has allowed photography to leave the category of exotic inventions and become an accessible and self-contained genre, overcrowded with brilliant professional and amateur pictures – a world of natural luxury in close-up… What makes Pocket Sized different, however, is not the physical proximity of the photographic eye, but the transformation of nondescript pieces of rubbish into hallucinatory presences, self-standing forms of life, rivalling in character and expression. And then there’s their colour. Their many colours. Boryana’s ability to draw out magic out of non-magical objects through her photography is here brought to perfection, to perfectly sized perfect simplicity. This is a perfectly simplified capture of the everyday magic that accompanies us, unnoticed, on our daily routines. And above all, Pocket Sized stresses the fact that we have become spoiled, relying too much on our eyes to provide us with ever larger, grander, cosmic, shopping-mall-big-bang-sized eyefulls of bites. It winks at our brains, sodden with visual messages, as if to say “Hey, life is not SFX, bought from producers for oh-so-modest a price!” Colours gently smile from the bottoms of our pockets, empty like our dreams. In fact, if a sense revolution were to happen, each one of us would realize that the objects we surround ourselves with are but insignificant hallucinations in impermanent colour, and what we consider rubbish, if magnified even a little, proves to be what is significant and real. Even if you don’t appreciate it when someone seems to be reading into pictures more than you can find in them yourselves, rest assured that perfect enjoyment is to be had discovering the creatures of your imagination in Boryana’s photographs. And don’t forget – something living is hiding in your pocket, even when it’s empty.