Bulgaria / Croatia / Romania
Winter 2002

I call it simply "my post-communist project".... when pressed by outside entities to give it a more pretentious title, I‘ve used "Wreckage of Empire"..... whatever..... this collection of images has turned into the photographic equivalent of the infamous Star Trek "Tribbles" episode..... it started out way back when, after the dissolution of the USSR and the lifting of the Iron Curtain, as war coverage..... then it was the aftermath of war..... then it was just me wandering around (sometimes drunk, due to the extreme hospitality of the people and their insistence that I heavily sample their various forms of home-brewed alcohol), taking pictures of anything and everything that interested me - and damn near everything interested me.....
 
Now fast-forward to the present..... "my post-communist project" has become this massive, semi-amorphous body of work that ranges across most every aspect of people, landscape and architecture..... some of it has already been seen in various magazines and exhibitions, etc., as well as in the limited-edition portfolio 13 Million Tons of Pig Iron.... much of it, however, has yet to see the light of day (in September I will begin to distill all of these disparate images into a single book, which hopefully will hit the shelves by the end of 2007)..........
 
With such a vast project I try to mentally group images into sub-sets just so I can keep a handle on what I‘ve done ("cityscapes;" "religious pilgrimages;" "village architecture;" "industrial panoramics;" "rural life;" "Roma/Gypsies," et. al.).... the photographs appearing on the Luminous-Lint website are taken from one such sub-set, which (again in contempt for utterly pretentious titles) I simply refer to as my "visual diary" images..... "visual diary" images are those that are the most "loose" or "impressionistic" - sometimes they are shot from the window of a train or bus, or while I‘m walking from one place to the next, but mostly they are taken while I‘m just wandering around in some exploratory or aimless or semi-aimless fashion..... at any rate, the following images (shown here for the first time) were taken in Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania in Winter 2002..... seen as a series and devoid of individual captions, they attempt to immerse the viewer in the gritty feel of the more impoverished regions of these post-communist countries........
 
Bruce Haley
 
July, 2006