Please, stay

Please, stay is a long-term photographic project about childhood, social exclusion, and unequal access to education in Roma communities in Bulgaria. It began three years ago in Roma neighbourhoods and developed through my work as a teacher and my growing connection with children for whom staying in school is a daily challenge.

The project explores how poverty, a lack of support, early marriage, and early parenthood restrict opportunities from childhood. For some of these children, the future is reduced to immediate survival. Leaving school deepens their isolation and passes deprivation from one generation to the next, while institutional support fails to reach everyone who needs it.

Moving between the neighbourhood and the classroom, the vibrant, unsettled images reveal both the children’s vitality and the uncertainty of their lives. Their stories affect me personally, but they also demand public attention. Children who grow up without education and care become adults whose difficulties are often viewed solely as personal failures. Yet this is also our failure as a society—when we choose to look away from their lives and judge the consequences without examining the causes.

Please, stay is my daily appeal to the children to remain in school, and a call for society to recognise those who remain invisible, with empathy and a willingness to act. Education offers a possibility for change, but access to it requires conditions no child can create alone.