Many years ago Zafer Galibov abandoned his “serious profession” of qualified engineer, to return to an earlier hobby in which he had been very well respected. A hobby which became his profession and his vocation, “photography”. Already from his debut in the press, of mostly report photographs, it was becoming obvious that Zafer Galibov was a true artist. His first photographs appeared at a time when Bulgaria had just started following the example of Germany, and some other countries, in trying to gain recognition of photography as an art, something  which continues until the present moment. Now with much greater evidence of numerous realistic examples. One can claim that part evidence is to be  seen, with the growing international reputation of Zafer Galibov, whose work now  identifies him as one of the leading contemporary Bulgarian art photographers.

At a time when Galibov’s career was just beginning, the world practice of art photography had imposed the ‘paradoxes’ fashion, with various weird and wonderful approaches, which the authors tried to use to in a big to prove they were artists – surrealists, abstractionists or conceptualists. Zafer Galibov avoided this fashion and remained  true to the archeptypal; aesthetics of photography which was formed under the influence of naturalism (In the good and broad sense of the term) in the second half of the 19th century. This is to say that he approaches his subjects not with pre-conceived ideas, but rather like an explorer with an understanding of feelings, thoughts, fate and real life situations  portraying what is beautiful in life, the movements of the people, no matter whether they are famous or not). He also thinks of the traces that movements leave their routes, trajectories and effects. Movements which are multidirectional and different in their essence. In his photographs one can see fixed gestures and mimics of people heading somewhere, halting for an instance, engaged in some kind of workday or holiday activity. A bird is flying in the vast space  of Antarctica.
           
Frozen in time are the formations of geotectonic forces – odd plastic like forms finished by erosion and the elements of nature. The diverging paths across the hilly ground bring dynamics to the composition, but Rainer Maria Rilke of “The Book of Piligrims” writes the overall suggestion, some hundred years ago.

A herd of goats or cropping at the scant leaves of grass are scattered around here and there looking in various directions. A weird slow rhythm. The shepherds are missing; they have abandoned their homes and villages and immigrated to Turkey in the mid-80s. A seemingly calm picture which symbolises  the tragedy of human fate and unforgivable political actions. A manifestation of Galibov’s unerring skill to extract meaning and sense from ordinary situations at first sight. This is of course not his invention. One can see it in the work of other genius’s , the cicle of drawings and graphics, dating back three and a half centuries and known under the title of “Here is life” (Neer het Leren – cycle by Peter Broegel). In his work however the Bulgarian photographer, without relying on any traditions, covers everything one  senses and sees, from the subject matter to its artistic interpretation, he presents all of this as a fully-fledged works of art. In each single work we can see just what has provoked the artist, and yet add to it from our own worldly aesthetic and intellectual experience. If we continue speculating on the aesthetic features of Zafer Galibov’s photographic art, we should realise that he cannot evade the ugly because it really exists in life. This photographer however does not treat it in a report like way, as a sensation, or as some kind of curiosity which could attract unsound interest. For him it is to a full extent valid, that the “aesthetics of the ugly” are the expressions of the artists from the shcool of The New materiality, and before them Edgar  Degas and of George Rouault. The artist, belonging to “the splendid world of art” requires him to be much more than a hedonist, who has set himself the task to fascinate and charm by only presenting us with pleasant sight.  

We now come to the movements, the motions and the images that are seen of the creative process. This process begins with the selection of the subject matter, which is to be fixed by the objective of the camera, and proceeds to the building of a collection, in which each  individual work and all of them together are marked by the author’s responsibility to his viewers. The responsibility that offers us something significant, full of the sense and meaning of excitement and ideas. In terms of subject matter his ranges from sociology to the beauty of the  landscape, from the psychology of the individual to the whole increasingly globalised world in which we lived. The artist covers his own way from the “seen” to the significant; this is what the science of aesthetics describes as the creative process. However the kitchen of the art photographer is not open for us to peep inside. He serves us ready results and offers them for assessment, comment and sharing of the aforementioned responsibility but also with confidence.  Because he has done all this for us, he has done it, so he expects us to respond. He does it so that we can see our place in the complicated, seemingly narrow, but still wide and still difficult to understand world.  

The artist travels instead of us, to I would say all kinds of places in the towns and villages in which we live, around them and across the countryside. Places some of them interesting, some of them desolate, which can be found around the world, From Lithuania to Copenhagen, to the country  of Tango and the Southern Continent. From Paris to Katmandy, he travels willingly and untiringly, and when  he is already  far away it turns out that he has no suitcase – he has set out on a trip to draw impressions and turn them into art. Too few are the things that he  cannot live without and he will not bring back souvenirs. He travels instead for you and me. How can one help lending him a suitcase, when it turns out that he has spared no effort to bring us something different from “out there”, from the wide familiar, yet still so unknown world. This ensures that he has made it up to us one hundred times with his attention to his work and to what he has achieved  though it.