Christa Rousseva is a self-taught photographer at Williams. Both her parents are from Bulgaria, and she has been visiting her family in the country all her life. This collection was assembled from photographs taken in the village where her grandmother lives. Its subjects are people and places familiar to her from her many trips, but only intermittently available for shooting.

“I think photographs can lie a little bit,” Christa says, and acknowledges that the rustic, nostalgic quality she achieves is as much the result of her film development as it is a reflection of her locales. Her subjects are deeply personal, yet they feel familiar and open, made available to us by Christa’s eye. “If I see something beautiful, I take a picture,” she explains, and her photographs invite us to imagine what she finds beautiful in each image, given the personal history each one represents.

-Interview with the Parlor Tricks Editors, 2015

-Christa Rousseva, class of 2018