Pray For Rain
Martin Atanasov
AKINA Books
English
Softcover
32 pages
200 x 280 mm
2014
ISBN Not Available
Through his lens and ink-pen, Bulgarian photographer Martin Atanasov conjures the magic of ancient pagan rites, re-performing and illustrating the rain-making ‘German’ ritual. Pray for rain is an intense homage to a long-forgotten lore, a credo belonging to a time before the Orthodox Church, before the Slavic people settled down on Bulgarian land.
In ancient times, prolonged drought would put the life of entire villages based upon agriculture in jeopardy.
A Bulgarian folk tradition prescribed how to make the rain fall once again to save the crop. All of the girls and women of a village would gather at the river bank and fashion a clay doll with defined face and a disproportionately large penis. The clay figure was known as ‘German’, a male spirit of fertility, dying and then resurrecting with the revival of vegetation.
(source: https://ascenseurvegetal.com/en/monographie/357-pray-for-rain-eclisse-no10.html)
About the Artist
Martin Atanasov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1991. In 2010 he graduated in Printmaking from the National School of Fine Arts “Iliya Petrov”, Sofia. He completed his BA degree in Photography at the Film and Television School of the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) in 2014. He works in the field of photography, drawing and photo book form. His first book project Pray For Rain was published in collaboration with AkinaBooks, London, in 2014.
atanasovmartin.blogspot.com
(source: https://dergreif-online.de/contributors/martin-atanasov/)
About the Publisher
AKINA Books is an independent publishing house of photobooks which carry their experimental singularity in contents, visual narratives, handmade and hybrid binding techniques, paper combinations and printing.
akinabooks.com
(source: https://akinabooks.com/about/)
