"Father and Son" is a long-standing and international project that Valery Poshtarov started in 2020 in his native Bulgaria. Captured by his camera were fathers and sons from Serbia, Turkey, North Macedonia, Armenia, Georgia and Greece, standing in front of his lens hand in hand, in a moment of closeness, encounter and journey towards each other. Thus, through his heroes, whom Valery bows down to, he makes us think about something much bigger than personal identity - Who are we, as part of an environment, of a cultural identity? What do we inherit from our ancestors, what do we take, enrich and change from them? And how much courage it actually takes to hold hands.

"It all started from a morning walk when I was taking my two sons to school and holding their hands. We passed another father who, seeing us, said, "Oh, you're just for a picture!" So he took the first shot that way - verbally. And I began to think that maybe really at some point, we as men, have a need to let go of our father's hand and find ourselves. But I decided to prove to myself that this relationship could actually stay alive. That's when I came up with the idea of doing a portrait of my father and my grandfather, who was 95 at the time, the two of them holding hands."

A year later, during the pandemic, Valery took this shot without having the energy and desire for anything more. Yet he was to be surprised:

"I was in front of a house at the edge of Sofia where a man and a woman came out, and the woman was clutching a framed portrait of a young man. At first I thought I was going to get kicked out because I was taking pictures of their house. She came up to me and said, "We had an only son who died eight months ago. My husband really wants you to take a picture of him with our son." And when that happened, when my thoughts were realized in a situation with total strangers, I found the connection between us humans. Beyond even father and son relationships. And I realized that we are really in this together for a very little while, and we have the opportunity to exchange energy. And that exchange is the thing that continues to excite me."

"I was really very happy to travel around all 28 districts of the country and maybe in every single town in Bulgaria look for fathers and sons," says the photographer to Radio Bulgaria and admits that the search for the heroes in this project itself is an essential part of the process. 

"Very rarely do we see fathers and sons living together in the same settlement or having a real relationship with each other as adults. And that in itself, I think, is not just about the relationship between men in a home, but we're talking about the relationship between generations here. To find the relationship between them means to find the relationship between values. And this hand-holding is exactly the bridge that is needed. To meet just one father and son, I had to talk to at least a hundred people, and it's very beautiful, because somebody tells me that their son is somewhere abroad and they call him. Or somebody says there are neighbors who know a father and son and so the whole community gets involved in this process."

As for the photography itself - it is not an end in itself, but an expression of a realized act of mutuality and sincere emotion that I believe is felt, Valery tells us. Not everyone has agreed to hold hands with their parent. Sometimes the seconds of intimacy represented the entire path these blood-related individuals had walked toward each other again, or perhaps for the first time. And the captured frame has remained once again the only sign of mutuality. "And here I think many people would recognize themselves," the photographer states. 

After working in a number of countries in the Balkans, Georgia turned out to be the country where Poshtarov took photos for his project Father and Son for the longest time. He managed to travel to all its geographical areas thanks to his partnership with National Geographic and funding from the European Union. 

Where the local people did not know the language, Valery would enter into dialogue with them through 35 sentences that he had voiced by voicesover actors in the respective language or through cards from the project that he gave them. 

Purely geographically, this project developed very deliberately with the idea of rebuilding this notion of a cultural identity that somehow bears its marks in different places in different ways and at the same time, bringing home its existential universality. "I very much see the differences when I'm working in different places, and again they're to do with the cultural presuppositions of it. Because, as I said, this hand-holding between father and son is a hand-holding on common values, and in countries where there are or have been conflicts, it is very difficult for the younger generation to recognise the values of the previous generation and to recognise their future in them. If I were to accept any kind of salute, it would be for the work itself, for the photographs themselves as an achievement, not for me, but for the people who had the courage to join their hands and set this example. If it is so difficult for a father and son to hold hand, what about the rest of people?"

Yet there is hope. "I believe that we humans are like dots that, if we connect together, we can paint the most beautiful picture of humanity," Valery says.

Until May 6, all the awarded images from the World Competition are also on display at Somerset House in London, and after that the exhibition will travel around the world. In the summer, Father and Son will also be shown in a major solo exhibition in Cortona, Italy, with Valery Poshtarov taking images from the region to include in it shortly before. Large format images from the project will also be exhibited outdoors in France in the coming months. In the autumn the project will be shown within the traditional photographic meetings in Plovdiv. 

Valery Poshtarov was born in 1986. He studied at the National Art School in Varna and then plastic arts at the Sorbonne in Paris. He has had numerous exhibitions in different European countries. In 2022 he published his first book. This is a project he worked on for 14 years during which he toured nearly 1,000 villages. Last year, the project "Father and Son" was among the finalists of the prestigious LensCulture Portrait Awards 2023, and on the website the project was also honored as a special choice of the editor-in-chief of lensculture.com.