Vera Hadzhiyska

Photographic series and photobook, 2024

Night Walks is a photography project exploring notions of nostalgia, psychogeography, place attachment and migration.

The work documents several night walks I took in the neighbourhood I grew up in Bulgaria. The project is looking at the experience of returning to one’s birthplace and the sense of nostalgia when encountering a space once familiar in our past through the lens of the present. It is a reflection on the unavoidable changes both us and the places we are emotionally connected to encounter through time. For a migrant, these changes occur simultaneously apart from each other, which creates a unique experience of spaces once loved and familiar, now rendered foreign with time. It’s almost like time travelling. These walks transported my mind to moments in time, reliving fractures of childhood memories.

The book starts with an image looking out through the window of my family home, takes you on a night walk through my neighbourhood, and ends by returning home with an image of our front gate.