As her new book is published, Greta Ilieva speaks about her naturist upbringing and why seeing someone’s bed can feel more intimate than their naked body
Greta Ilieva grew up in communist Bulgaria, the daughter of a single mother who was a photographer. Her youth was spent loitering on the set of shoots, drying prints in darkrooms after school, and sometimes even stepping in as a model for her mum’s commercials. “That experience made me resist photography,” she admits. “I found it all overwhelming and excessive.” It was only years after moving to the UK as a teenager that she found herself unexpectedly back in the darkroom while on her MA at the Royal College of Art. “What once felt like a burden became grounding,” she says. “Photography became a visual language that felt like my own.”
Now, Ilieva uses the camera as a tool to understand others, especially those who have complex relationships to ideas of place and belonging. “Having grown up between Bulgaria and the UK, I often feel suspended between cultures, not fully anchored in either,” she explains. Drawn to the “stories, rituals, and inherited gestures” that shape us, this curiosity has shaded gently probing portraits seen in the pages of Dust, Dazed and Beauty Papers, and documentary projects ranging from studies of rural Bulgarian youth to England’s tight-knit female bodybuilding circuit. Her latest project, Rooms, is both her simplest and most intimate work yet – a quiet, arrestingly stark portrait series of women naked in their bedrooms.
Despite her resistance to following in her mother’s footsteps, Ilieva’s approach to the body can also be traced back to her youth. “My mum was a naturist,” she says. “At home, nudity was open, accepted, and part of everyday life.” This bohemian upbringing made Ilieva unfazed by the folds, quirks and curves of the body that are so often the subject of private self-admonishment for other young women. It was only as an adult that she began thinking more deeply about the emotions people hold towards their bodies, becoming curious about how they behave when they are alone, behind closed doors, when no one’s watching.
Ilieva began by photographing friends in their bedrooms in 2017, gradually expanding the project to include acquaintances and strangers discovered on Instagram. “Always, the people I photographed were those I felt some instinctive pull toward,” she says. “Women whose energy stayed with me in some way.” Shot in cool light, the portraits in Rooms strike a range of moods, each transfixingly intimate in its own unique way. In some images, it feels as if Ilieva isn’t even there, as her subjects close their eyes in bed or daydream as sunbeams stream through windows. Others take on a more sensual charge, as her women arch and coil their bodies on bedsheets in various states of command.
Ilieva wanted to capture each woman in her most authentic state, and so allowed shots to unfold naturally with her subjects guiding the way. “My process is quite organic,” she says. “It was very much about the person taking the picture and not me. I try to read their energy and move with it. Some lead, some wait. In the end, I want the image to feel honest. Ideally, they feel like self-portraits, with me simply acting as a tool or conduit to help make that visible.”
Paired with these shots are pictures of the women’s beds, which, interestingly, the photographer found more exposing to shoot, each a personal assemblage of crumpled sheets, artwork-filled walls, and bedside tables scattered with private artefacts. “Strangely, the nudity never felt like the intimate part,” she says. “What actually made me feel more uncomfortable was seeing someone’s bedsheets. One of the women I photographed said something that really lingered in my mind: that it’s not being naked that feels exposing, but the act of undressing. I realised I felt the same. Seeing the sheets, the traces of someone’s body and rest, somehow felt more revealing than looking at someone naked.”
While the project’s premise is simple – and indeed, well-explored by many other image-makers – there was something powerful and honest in the total vulnerability shared in these rooms that made Ilevia continue the series for eight years. “What stayed with me wasn’t always the image itself, but the conversation, the energy, or the awkward moment when we both realised the cat was watching,” she says. “I hope the work shows that I’m less interested in control and more in creating space for honesty, where people feel safe enough to be seen as they are.”
As the images are gathered together for the first time in a new book launched at women-led space Have a Butchers gallery in Dalston this week, the photographer hopes they might impart some of the body-embracing freedom of her naturist upbringing. “I want the viewer to feel completely at ease looking at these portraits, even if they’re standing next to their parents,” she says. “Nudity shouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I want to evoke a sense of presence, of being with oneself fully and without shame.”
Rooms by Greta Ilieva is published by Pigeoness Editions and is out now.
