The Night Hides A Second Moon

The Night Hides a Second Moon is an ongoing photographic exploration of absence, alienation, and the quiet violence of indifference. The work is influenced by a question I pose: 'What do we truly see when we look at others - and what remains half-ignored?' This series does not seek the resolution of this uncertainty, but offers exposure - revealing what happens when intimacy erodes, when connection falters, when presence is reduced to absence.

Though rooted in Bulgaria, the work extends into an universal terrain: the interior landscape of the self where people struggle to be seen and felt. It unfolds in homes, in gestures, in silences—where desire presses against constraint and the traces of emotional distance reveal themselves.

I do not approach people as subjects separate from me. Their longing, fear, and estrangement are also mine. As a queer person based in Bulgaria, I have lived the same fractures I photograph - the quiet shame, the unresolved conflicts, the weight of being different in a place that does not put up with difference. In that sense, their story is inseparable from my own, each image becoming a reflection of a shared human condition.

The project is titled The Night Hides a Second Moon because, like the Moon is reflecting only sunlight and does not possess its own glow, we humans also reflect that what is imprinted onto us - values, upbringing, attitude, that are picked up along the way we grow, as well as dissociation, confrontation and envy. While much is buried deep, unseen yet still tugging at us, we may not realise how we affect other people, how we erase their identities. The people I photograph are all seeking freedom, yet they are all stuck.

My photographs seek to give shape to this hidden gravity: the unreturned light of neglect, the silence of alienation, the residue of indifference. To bring it into visibility is to resist it. This work stands as a refusal to let estrangement harden into normality and a call to insist that no one should be left unseen, erased, or dissolved into a semblance of shame.