Verginia Dobreva (born in Bulgaria, 1998) is a photographer based in Sunderland, UK. She is interested in different photographic styles and explores narratives that are current and relevant through still photography. Previous projects of Verginia’s have touched upon topics such as climate change, mental illness, stereotypes surrounding sexuality and recently, her COVID-19 lockdown experience.
The New Normal
Since the start of the pandemic, people have faced and are still facing numerous challenges they never thought they would have to face; from remembering to sanitize and mask up, to maintaining relationships of any kind. The change and the effect of the challenges brought on by the pandemic and the lockdown periods have been explored and documented enough to show a significant shift in how human connection has adjusted to this way of life.
The New Normal explores the readjustment in the relationships in a person’s life, following the lockdown period and the transition period after the lifting of the restrictions that were put in place.
Reality VS Fiction
The climate crisis discourse has been more prevalent than ever in the last year. If it wasn’t for young activists demanding change in high-profile rallies around the world, the important discussion about this very real crisis would have been swept under the rug until it couldn’t be ignored anymore.
Climate change is very real. There is undeniable proof.
We have imagined our own end as a species in numerous ways, in movies specifically, yet we haven’t realized that what we’ve imagined as a “never going to happen” scenario is actually slowly happening without us realizing.
Ice melting, sea levels rising, earthquakes, the exhaustion of fossil fuels and effects from their use, extreme heat waves or cold seasons, viruses and ignorant governments – these events sound real, and they are, but they are also the reasons for the end of everything we know in ‘fictional’ stories in the movies.
