A Conversation With Svetlana Bachevanova

This summer, FotoEvidence, a publishing house dedicated to documentary photography focused on human rights and social and ecological justice, will publish DAWNING’s first book, Pipe Dreams. It is an immersive investigation into how water scarcity impacts the rights of women and girls in Kenya. To preview this exciting event, DAWNING recently sat down with one of the co-founders of FotoEvidence, Svetlana Bachevanova, to discuss her story and FotoEvidence’s contribution to documentary photography. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you know you wanted to be a photographer?

In the beginning I was very influenced by my mother, who had a taste in art. I wanted to be a painter, so I started studying visual art and textile design. But very soon, I discovered that with those media, going from idea to finished product takes a very long time. And I’m not a very patient person–I wanted to see the result right away.

So I started playing with my father’s camera, and was drawn to the immediacy of it. I heard about a school I could attend to study photography, so I did, and never looked back.

It sounds almost like photography chose you, rather than you choosing photography.

Even in my family, my devotion to photography is a common subject of discussion. It’s simply because I love what I do as a publisher of socially engaged photography. I don’t consider it work.

Tell us more about your upbringing and what drew you to documentary photography.

I was born and raised in Bulgaria, which at the time was part of the Soviet sphere of interest. In some ways it still is –a large share of Bulgarians today side with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. But even more so when I was growing up, we were under Communist rule and there was no real independent media. We were living in darkness, “protected” from knowing what was happening in the world.

In the winter of 1988, signs of the fall of the Berlin Wall started to appear, and a group of Bulgarian intellectuals got together to start the first anti-Communist newspaper, called Demokrazia. They invited me to join, and I did. That was the best decision I ever made.

When the first issue of Demokrazia was published, after 45 years of silence, people started lining up outside the newspaper’s office, eager to tell their stories, stories that they were afraid to speak about: relatives who had been disappeared, political assassination, extermination of the intellectual elite of the country, concentration camps. But it was difficult to illustrate these stories, because there was almost never any visual evidence.

Even when there was such evidence, it was destroyed by the departing regime. A few months after Demokrazia’s launch, as the Bulgarian communist regime was collapsing, a fire started at the Communist Party headquarters. Guess what burned? A large portion of the archive, mostly related to the forceful assimilation of Turks in Bulgaria.

This is about the power of photojournalism and the importance of documenting atrocities.

This history continues to resonate today. There’s a very famous image from the war in Ukraine, a pregnant woman being evacuated from a hospital in Mariupol, after a Russian missile strike hit the maternity ward. She later died from her injuries, along with her baby. We know about this tragedy because the Ukrainian photojournalist Evegeniy Maloletka remained in Mariupol after every other journalist had been evacuated from the area and continued to document what was happening.

Meanwhile, about 40 km from where that photo was taken, a Russian missile destroyed an apartment block and 57 people died. But no one knows about it, because there were no journalists and no images. If there had been photographers there, those stories would have been told, too. This is about the power of photojournalism and the importance of documenting atrocities.

On that note, can you talk more about FotoEvidence’s mission?

We are the only publisher solely dedicated to documenting human rights abuses around the world. So far, we’ve published 42 books that touch on issues in 38 countries. These are topics that don’t get taken up in the mainstream media.

Three of our projects have led to real changes – either in the law, or in policy, or in conditions on the ground. For example, the publication of Light Inside, Danielle Villasana’s work on transgender women in Peru, where trans people were dying at ages as young as 30 for lack of medical care, led to the establishment of a clinic there for transgender people.

Another remarkable story is the book we published in 2013, Crying Meri, on violence against women in Papua New Guinea. The Portuguese Russian photographer Vlad Sokhin had heard about widespread violence against women in Papua New Guinea, with most incidents going unpunished. So he went there, but discovered no one wanted to talk about it.

We mainly publish work that most publishers shy away from.

One day, there was an incident where a man attacked a woman and bit off part of her lower lip. Vlad was walking one day in Port Moresby and happened to see this woman with fresh bandages on her face, so he approached and asked to speak with her and she agreed.

After that, the floodgates opened, and people came forward to tell their stories. Vlad’s work received attention from global human rights organizations as well as the United Nations and led to legal changes in Papua New Guinea, where sexual assault is now a crime punishable by jail.

Do you think about those types of changes as one of the goals of your work?

We mainly publish work that most publishers shy away from. Our books are intended to inspire social change, to expose injustice, to create enduring evidence, and to spark calls for accountability. Once these issues come to light, change can come about through social activism inspired by our books, or due to shame or public embarrassment.

How did you first come into contact with DAWNING?

I received a very long, very passionate email from Raul Roman. I read it carefully, then I went to the website, and the first thing that came to my mind was, “these are a bunch of Don Quixotes.” I mean that as a compliment, of course! I think DAWNING is very unusual, a great project. And of course, Eric Andriantsialonina’s work as a graphic novelist is a huge contribution.

What do you think is noteworthy about Pipe Dreams and the stories it contains?

I think the issues that it highlights – water scarcity and extreme weather, and the ways those phenomena disproportionately impact women and girls in Kenya – are present in other parts of the world and growing in importance. And I think this book is a good way, a very gentle way to inform people about what’s happening there.

Pipe Dreams will also be FotoEvidence’s first book that includes hand-drawn illustrations, not just photography.

The cover photograph is very important – the idea was to use one of the brightly yellow colored jerrycans that the women in Kenya use to carry water. We were having a conversation with the designer of the book, Melike Taşcıoğlu, who’s based in Istanbul. We had talked about using an image of one of those jerrycans, and after that conversation, she happened to come across one of them on the street in Istanbul and took a photo of it. That became the cover.

Lately, FotoEvidence has been focusing on the war in Ukraine. Why is that so important to you?

This question takes us back to my roots – to the story of the Bulgarians who wanted to share their stories, and the newspaper that doesn’t have images.

Even before the invasion got underway, I knew what the Russians are capable of. I just know. And I knew that if we don’t start documenting right away, we wouldn’t have the evidence of these atrocities. So I approached the Open Society Foundations for support and we put out a call for photographs, which we compiled in a book that was published in 2023, Ukraine: A War Crime.

In this book, I asked the photojournalists who contributed to write something describing their experience while covering the war, so that their testimonies accompany the photographs. And it just became an extraordinary document.

We sent the book to many people, including members of the U.S. Congress who opposed sending aid to Ukraine. One of them was J.D. Vance. We never got a response. It was also delivered to the Ukrainian prosecutor general, and to President Zelensky, who said we had “done a good job.”

Putting the book together and going through thousands of images was a severe experience. At some point, I realized I knew the names of every dead person involved in these stories. By the end of the project, I felt like I had been on the front lines for four months.

In November 2023, we traveled to Irpin and Bucha, and it’s like nothing has ever happened – it’s been built back and there’s no trace of the atrocities that took place. I thought, What if we had never published Ukraine: A War Crime and the follow-up volume that went to print last year, Ukraine: Love+War? How would the tragic history of Ukraine have been documented?

Now the books will be in schools and public libraries for future generations to remember.