National heroes from the photo studio

She explains that the originals of the photos in the “heroes’ gallery” familiar to her since childhood are all carte-de-visite portraits. This kind of photography was once a mass phenomenon of popular culture. A new technique had made it possible to produce whole series of photos quickly and inexpensively. Invented in Paris in the mid 19th century, the new medium soon caught on in many countries.

An instrument of self-presentation

At first, it was only the powerful who had their portraits taken, but their example was soon followed by people from all walks of life, from merchants in Paris to black slaves in the American South and rebel fighters in the Balkans. Calling cards featuring photographic portraits were used to introduce oneself and for networking purposes. They were mailed to influential people or left in their anterooms. They were used for courting and helped to make business contacts and attract sympathizers. “The carte de visite was an analog precursor of today’s social networks,” says Baleva, “Facebook of the 19th century.”

In her classes, she urges students to pose these questions as a matter of routine: How was the image created? Who created it, and for what purpose? What aspects of reality have been excluded? With reference to her ongoing research, she explains that around 1870 the forerunner of Facebook was used by, among others, a few dozen men in the Ottoman Balkans who wanted a revolution: Vasil Levski, one of the main rebel leaders, wrote to local revolutionary committees explicitly demanding that his portrait be distributed, a picture that idealizes him as a courageous revolutionary, dressed as a Hussar officer.

In reality, Baleva says, Levski and his fellow rebels were not exactly glorious figures. “Their actions are better thought of as terror attacks than heroic mass uprisings against foreign rulers.” For instance, the rebels would lay ambush in the hope that the resulting skirmishes would provoke the Ottoman state into a disproportionate retaliation strike which in turn would prompt other superpowers to intervene. Their strategy was ultimately successful. In April 1877, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire – and following the Tsarist Empire’s victory, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro became politically independent in 1878.

In Bulgaria, however, many a patriotically minded historian felt that reality was not heroic enough. Pointing to the walls of her research room covered in photographs, Baleva says, “To them, the fact that these heroes’ portraits were so homogeneous in style meant a welcome opportunity to create the revisionist fiction of a cohesive military unit fighting for national liberation.” She adds that Bulgarian history textbooks still talk about “people rising up against foreign rule in their thousands,” though in reality there were only a few hundred, as close examination of the historical sources has shown. “It would be wrong to think that photos only reproduce reality; they also create realities,” says Baleva.

Images as a research focus

For this reason, Baleva considers that historical photos should no longer be seen as an “illustrated supplement to historiography – they should be a central component of both historical and contemporary research.” To back up her point, she cites the so-called “iconic turn,” which has been motivating many researchers in the humanities and social sciences since the 1990s. It is an approach that moves away from written sources, with images coming increasingly to the fore.

“It was about time,” Baleva says, adding that it is easy to get lost in the flood of images that we are continually exposed to in the modern world. She says that she is often amazed by how many young people she sees obsessively taking photos with their smartphones. She never takes any herself. In dealing with images of any kind, she takes her time whenever possible, whether she is reading a newspaper, surfing the Internet, studying history books or visiting a museum. “It seems absurd to me to stroll through an exhibition of images as you would through a park,” she says. “Whenever I go to the Kunstmuseum, I only look at one picture each time.”

Finally, Baleva returns once more to the historic carte-de-visite portraits that are the subject of her current research. It was not unusual for the “users” to be misled: The person portrayed would often turn out to be far less good-looking, well-read, brave or competent than their portrait had made them seem, much as on the Internet today. “If you were savvy about using the 19th century equivalent of Facebook,” she says, pointing to the photos on the walls, “then you could conquer hearts, rise to fame or cause political upheaval.”

Even today, a century and a half after they were taken, the “Bulgarian national heroes’” portraits have an influence on life in her home country, says Baleva. Many of the men are shown posing in Hussar uniforms, which originated in Poland and Hungary. “Today, members of the Bulgarian National Guard are proud to wear their Hussar uniforms,” she says, “they’re considered traditional.” In reality, at the time of the “National Revolution,” the only context where these clothes would have been worn in what is now Bulgaria was not in battle, but in a photographic studio.