After the Fathers

“You are a man. Pull yourself together,” my father used to repeat.

After the Fathers is an ongoing photographic series that examines masculinity not as identity, but as inherited behavior. The project looks at men as carriers of gestures, reactions, emotional restrictions, and learned performances passed through generations almost automatically.

Photographed across Bulgaria, the images move between intimate portraits, symbolic still lifes, fragmented bodies, domestic spaces, and moments of psychological tension. Rather than documenting specific individuals, the work constructs a fragmented emotional landscape where vulnerability and violence, tenderness and control, coexist within the same inherited system.

Growing up in post-socialist Eastern Europe, I became increasingly aware of how masculinity is often transmitted through silence, discipline, emotional suppression, and repetition. The project does not attempt to provide direct answers or clear narratives. Instead, it approaches photography as a space where these inherited structures can become visible through atmosphere, gesture, rhythm, and absence.

The photographs function as emotional fragments detached from their original context and reorganized into a subjective visual sequence – one that reflects not only personal memory, but broader social patterns that continue to shape male behavior today.

Dimitri Stefanov is a photographer born in Bulgaria who has lived in Spain for the past years. He studied photography at EFTI in Madrid, where he received an award for best photographer of the year and held a solo exhibition. His work explores masculinity, memory, vulnerability, and inherited systems of behavior. Working primarily in long-term photographic projects, Stefanov is interested in how personal experience reflects broader social and cultural structures, particularly within post-socialist Eastern Europe.