Until 1989 the Bulgarian-Turkish border was the extreme south-east limit of the East Bloc. The border zone was heavily guarded and no one could enter it. It was also absolutely forbidden to film or photograph along the border. In 2004 Vesselina Nikolaeva was the first person since World War II to receive permission to document it. She found a desolate terrain that still clearly bore the scars of a decades-long military presence. Since then these have all been wiped out. So as to not be reminded of its communist past, Bulgaria has stripped its European borders of every reference to the Iron Curtain.

Vesselina Nikolaeva (b. Bulgaria, 1976) graduated from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht and in 2005 won the Canon Prize, the Silver Camera prize for talented young photographers. No Man's Land is a part of her book on the 120-year history of the Bulgarian-Turkish border, which will be published in 2009.