Margarita Rousso

Black and white portrait of a woman with long hair wearing a dress with thin straps, looking upward with a thoughtful expression.

Margarita Rousso is a visual artist and photographer working in contemporary art photography, currently based in Sofia. Moving between portraiture, conceptual and observational photography, her work searches for what lies beneath the visible—the emotional and psychological undercurrents of human experience. She has presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Bulgaria and internationally, including exhibitions in Paris, London and Bern. She has published two photographic books, Faraway Songs and Context.

Moving between the intimate and the archetypal, the observed and the poetic, Rousso’s visual language is cinematic and instinctive, marked by deep contrasts, raw texture and an attraction to the imperfect and unexpected. Drawn to gesture, chance encounters, bodies, faces and the charged details of everyday life, she seeks moments in which reality briefly reveals something beyond itself. This pursuit finds its most distilled expression in The Body Speaks, her current series, where gesture, posture, movement and touch become a language beyond words.

Earlier bodies of work include Faraway Songs, a six-year project and published monograph on the people of the Rhodope Mountains; Context, created in collaboration with writer Raymondo Varsano; and Andalucía: Passion for Life, an exploration of identity, connection and the mythology of southern Spain.

Emotion is not the subject of Rousso’s work. Emotion is the language. Truth is the constant. Her photographs inhabit the space where reality gives way to poetry, and where what remains unseen can, for a brief moment, be felt.

Selected Work

Black and white photo of a person with long hair with shadows of a textured grid cast across their face and hand.

THE BODY SPEAKS

Rooted in a deeply personal encounter with the painful discrepancy between words and the physical, The Body Speaks is Margarita Rousso’s most intimate work to date.

Library or bookstore with shelves filled with books and stacks of books on tables and chairs. A small handwritten sign reads 'All is wind, but the wind...'

CONTEXT

Context is a conceptual photographic project by photographer Margarita Rousso, created in artistic collaboration with writer Raymondo. It explores the unstable territory of meaning itself.

Silhouette of a person, possibly a cowboy, standing on a mountain ridge during sunset or sunrise, with rolling mountain ranges in the background and the sun shining brightly in the sky.

FARAWAY SONGS

Faraway Songs is Margarita Rousso’s first book, collecting words and images from the people of the Rhodope Mountains during her six years of travels there. More than a portrait of the Rhodopes, it is a meditation on the dignity and breadth of the human spirit.

Two women are talking at a bar with colorful lighting. One woman has curly hair and is holding a bottle, the other woman has straight hair and appears to be listening.

ANDALUCIA:
passion for life

Emerging from an exploration of the particular character of Southern Spain, the series reaches beyond geography toward something universal: the desire for connection and the courage to meet life with intensity.