Lucid Eyes

When was the last time you felt close to someone? How do you know that someone has decided to trust you? Can you read in someone’s eyes that you have been allowed in their inner world? 

Physical love is not of the flesh. It awakens everything good in the object of desire, and in the desiring one: the will to reach beyond the visible. All dried up rivers of thoughts, perceptions and obscure beliefs begin to flow just from one look at the lover who comes with the message: closer, sooner, deeper, more alive.

Lucid eyes is a series of portraits and landscapes from the coveted world outside. In this project warmth and openness are not hidden under layers of social rules. The people in the pictures allow the viewer to step into their inner world – but they are also looking into him. Their look is relaxed and open, their eyes are lucid. And we feel the impulse to do the same – when we look at them, when we look at anyone around us. Their eyes are a physical reminder of what it means to love. 

Vesselina Nikolaeva (1976) is a photographer and photography teacher from Bulgaria. The main focus in her long-term projects are the things that are becoming extinct, that are bound to disappear forever. She hunts dying cultures and the collective nostalgia of societies, their feeling of loss and alienation and their mechanisms for managing globalisation. She has published books like School №7 (2007), Simply a Line (2009), Yesterday When I was Little (2014) and others.