Poverty is not a moment in life. For some families, it becomes a condition passed from one generation to the next.

Near Pleven, Bulgaria, families live with economic hardship that shapes the most ordinary parts of everyday life.

Children grow up in homes where opportunities are limited. Parents try to provide for their families with few resources. Older people, after a lifetime of work, sometimes face old age in the same conditions of uncertainty and deprivation.

Different generations share the same spaces, the same struggles and, often, the same hopes.

This project looks at these lives not as statistics, but through the places and moments that make up everyday existence — homes, streets, courtyards, belongings, family relationships and the quiet routines of people living with very little.

What it means to live when basic security can never be taken for granted?

For a child, poverty can shape the possibilities of the future.

For an adult, it can shape the choices of the present.

For an older person, it can become the reality of a lifetime.

Together, these generations reveal something larger than individual circumstances: how poverty can persist across decades, how opportunities can be inherited — or denied — and how difficult it can be to break a cycle once it has begun.

The project asks:

What does it mean to grow up, live and grow old on the margins?

And what happens when the circumstances of one generation become the starting point for the next?

These photographs are about people, rather than poverty itself, because poverty is not only about what people lack.

It is also about the possibilities they are denied.