50 stories - Radost Racheva
25 July 2022 Events and Discussions
Melbourne
Photographer and author of the book “The Bulgarians of Melbourne”
I was born in the heart of the Rose Valley - the town of Kazanluk. At the age of 12 my family moved to Sofia, where I graduated from high school and the Technical University majoring in Еlectronic engineering. I worked for many years at the Institute of Computing Engineering and later in Technoinvest. Soon after the fall of the iron curtain in the early 1990s, I emigrated to Australia with my daughter and settled in Melbourne, where I live for 30 years now. My dream had always been to immerse myself in an English-speaking environment to learn the language I have loved since I was a child, and I was given this opportunity as a professional emigrant. Emigration is hard and not for everyone, but the opportunities that a person receives in a highly developed and settled country as Australia are well worth it.
Life here taught me a lot and opened me to the world. I got rich spiritually and emotionally, I broadened my worldview, became more tolerant and sympathetic to the fates of others. I like nature and people here from whom I have always received understanding and support. After 17 years of working as a network administrator at two prestigious universities, I decided to leave this media and devote myself to my long-standing passion for the visual arts. I was accepted as a 58-year-old photography student at the same school university where I worked. My colleagues were 3 times younger than me; they had just graduated high school. I encountered many difficulties, especially with the amount of material taught and the short deadlines for the assignments, but I found a lot of joy and satisfaction in what I did. Very often working in the studio all day I did not think about food and did not feel hunger. In 2016, I was chosen to participate in a two-week curriculum along with nine others students, which took place in Shanghai, China. I finished my training at the end of 2017 with a degree in photography from RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), and I was among 33 graduates from the initial 100 in the course. My book "The Bulgarians of Melbourne" was created as a thesis and contained 30 portraits and 30 stories of Bulgarian emigrants. I spent the year 2018 in Bulgaria where I had the good fortune to attend for the first time and film the "Festival of Roses" in Kazanluk. Bulgaria has always been in my heart and one day I will return home. I am currently working as a freelancer under the name "radostphotography". I shoot mainly international festivals and performances of the Bulgarian folklore groups "Bulgari" and "Horo" in Melbourne.
The story is from the book “Bulgarians in Melbourne” (2017) from Radost Racheva, who is also author of the photographs, provided pro bono for the project.
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