One Flower + One Moment = Freedom

Growing up in Bulgaria behind the Iron Curtain, photographer Eva Timothy yearned for a life in the United States. She remembers "having nothing, but having a dream." When she finally arrived here in 1994, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she kissed the ground.

"We lived in hard circumstances without freedom," Timothy recalls of her Bulgarian childhood. "That is why America is very dear to me."

Today, happily nestled in Massachusetts with her husband and three children, Timothy is living the American life she once only imagined. She became a US citizen three years ago, and just recently, her parents moved here as well.

She is also thriving in her professional life as an award-winning photographer whose work is now part of the permanent collections of the U.S. Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and which has exhibited at several museums and galleries around the United States and Great Britain.

A significant amount of Timothy's photography is done in black and white. Contrasts of light and dark, relieved by bleak shades of gray, perhaps suggest the residue of her life behind the Iron Curtain. But her images appear almost to move with an unexpected vibrancy. Timothy's entire portfolio, in fact, seems to express a unique joy that somehow found a way to stay alive under oppression.

Despite the starkness of a communist existence, Timothy remembers her home city of Sofia as a place of natural beauty filled with endearing holiday customs, scrumptious food, a rich storytelling tradition, and deep family bonds. Before she ever had a camera, she says, she was taking pictures of this world with her mind.

Her father, an artist who painted in oils, used to stop her on walks occasionally and tell her simply to look at a flower. Time became inconsequential while Timothy examined the flower in an imaginative space of her own. "You would just completely pause," she says of these moments. "It just changes you. There's so much beauty around us, and it's so important to notice that. We have to slow down and feel it more in our hearts."

By encouraging such quiet and seemingly random observations, Timothy's father showed her an aperture through which she could glimpse another world. Not surprisingly, lenses have become not just the tools of her art but a consistent subject of her photography. Prisms, magnifying glasses, spectacles, telescopes—all of which were invented to stretch the vision of humanity—feature prominently in Timothy's work.

Her recent monograph, Lost in Learning: The Art of Discovery, celebrates the instruments and texts used by the great thinkers of the Renaissance, individuals who changed the course of human history. "I was amazed by the Renaissance," she says. "These people had so little in terms of technology and yet they did so much."

When "photographing" the Renaissance, as she phrases it, she used the power of juxtaposition to suggest moments of awareness that led to the great discoveries made by visionaries like Galileo and Columbus.

"I might bring two or three of their books together in my studio and try to create a whole new picture, or tell a whole new story about them," Timothy says. "I want to look even deeper into their lives, to find out even more about them, to discover them all over again." She describes the sensation of creating an image with a portrait of Galileo looking at his own sketch of the moon: "My heart was beating so fast!"

Timothy sometimes takes an entire day to set up one photograph. It is not easy, she says, because even life in America can suffocate the creative spirit, especially with the encroachment of technology and the urgency to be connected. She tries to control that aspect of each day, to guard the time and space she needs to work.

"When you're constantly plugged in, it's very hard to create," Timothy says. "When I work, I don't want an Internet or phone. I close all the doors. It's just me. Just my time to create."

Even now, she yearns for the freedom of one moment, the expansive feeling of hovering quietly over a delicate flower in Bulgaria.

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