Boris Yanev – “Post-Documentary Portraits II”

12 November – 31 December 2026

Opening: 12 November 2026, 6:00 p.m.

What remains of a human likeness after photography has served its purpose? And can something considered useless reveal more than the photograph itself?

Art Gallery – Ruse presents Post-Documentary Portraits II by Boris Yanev, a series of images in which the remnants of the photographic process take on a new life.

More than 30 years ago, during the production of ID photographs using Polaroid film, traces of the photographed faces were left on the materials used. These remnants would normally be discarded. Boris Yanev, however, preserved them and, decades later, transformed them into the basis for new images.

Created in late 2012 and early 2013, the series employs the scanning of remnants from the wet photographic process, a technique the artist calls “scannerography.”

In the resulting images, documentary accuracy gives way to unexpected visual transformations. Faces emerge and disappear amid fields of colour, surface distortions and traces of time. The portraits no longer serve to verify identity. Instead, they become images open to the viewer’s imagination and interpretation.

Post-Documentary Portraits II explores the boundaries between the private and the public, between photography as testimony and the image as artistic interpretation. What was once part of a standardised identification procedure acquires new meaning, liberated from its original purpose.

The exhibition invites viewers to encounter images that exist between the document and its transformation, between the material’s element of chance and the artist’s conscious choices.