Staring at the big picture

By Harry van Versendaal

Photo-sharing app Instagram last week announced it had reached the 100 million-user milestone. Jennifer Trausch is one of them. But the Berlin-based artist much prefers to make her instant photographs using a refrigerator-sized vintage Polaroid camera.

Trausch, 36, can normally be found operating one of the five such machines, built in the late 1970s by the former US tech giant, at her studio in Berlin, where she moved this January after spending a year in Paris.

Before moving to Europe, the Ohio-born artist lectured and made photographs at the 20×24 Polaroid studio in Manhattan, where she was director of photography for about eight years. In a daring project that spanned from 2006 to 2011, Trausch, a Cleveland Institute of Art graduate, took the vintage camera out of the comfort zone of the protected studio environment and onto the rural roads of the American South to shoot poster-size, black-and-white pictures of fairs, auctions, bars and rodeos – a project that gave birth to her well-received “Touching Ground” exhibition.

From Germany, Trausch is currently trying to spread the love for instant photography, putting much of her time and energy into Impossible Works, a Berlin-based nonprofit supported by the Impossible Project, a company that manufactures new instant film for Polaroid 600 and SX-70 cameras. The mission of Impossible Works is to support artistic projects made with instant films.

Trausch was recently invited to Greece to participate in the jury of the 4th Cedefop Photomuseum Award – a 5,000-euro prize granted to photographers from all over the world by the EU’s European Center for the Development of Vocational Training and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography in the context of its PhotoBiennale.

During her stay in the northern port city, Trausch delivered two two-hour workshops at the museum on the basics of working with Impossible Project instant films with a variety of cameras and film types.

In an interview with Kathimerini English Edition, Trausch discussed her love for large-format photography and the particularities of her work in the digital era.

What drew you to large-format photography? What do you think is special about the 20×24?

I started out in photojournalism / documentary photography, so I really began my career shooting with small- and medium-format cameras. In 2001, I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to use the 20×24 Polaroid camera, and I have been working almost exclusively on large format ever since. I like how laborious shooting with big cameras is, how much attention you end up giving to each image.

Large cameras, especially the 20×24, also demand much more out of their subjects. The 20×24’s grandiosity makes people look into it in a different way, perhaps because it commands a certain kind of respect as a human-scale object. With the 20×24, there’s always a limited depth of field, and the way the world falls off behind the focal plane can be quite surreal, soft and graceful.

The 20×24 instant prints also have a material, painterly quality that is all their own; it is the sharp detail of a 20×24 negative in a contact-print, mixed with the softness of a print made by the diffusion transfer process.

How are you able to carry around and work with such a big and heavy machine that was meant for indoor use? Is it a hindrance?

The 20×24 Polaroid cameras – there are five original units built in the late 1970s – each weigh 105 kilos, so I had no choice but to find a way of working that was relatively easy. For my “Touching Ground” project, I chose B&W film since the film is fast enough that I could work in most conditions without extra lighting or equipment. I tried to simplify the shooting process so that it was just the camera, film, black cloths to keep the light out, and my assistant Kimberlee Venable and I.

I tend to not like when too much credence is given to the technical side of photography, as in what equipment or techniques were used for a certain effect, but I have to admit that in this case the camera had a huge influence over what we could and couldn’t do. Sometimes it held us back as the camera couldn’t always go where we wanted it to go (on a rooftop or on an oil rig) and other times it was exhausting to push it up muddy hills or to lift it over train tracks. Taking the camera out and setting up always took a lot of effort, which added a certain pressure on each shoot to get things right.

This also meant that when I didn’t “get the shot” I hoped for, it felt much more devastating because of the extreme physical effort it took to set it up in the first place. Perhaps if I had had more hands to help we wouldn’t have felt this pressure and disappointment so much, but I really preferred to work without a giant crew so that the process with my subjects could be intimate.

What are your favorite themes? What kind of things do you like to photograph?

I am interested in the idea of place, the culture and traditions surrounding a particular place at a particular time, and whether I can take you there to feel it.

For me this is always a mix of portraits, landscapes and activities that are indicative of that place. Sometimes it is specific to one environment, such as my “Skateland” series, or in the case of “Touching Ground,” it’s about a much broader portrait of regional American culture.

I also am interested in the idea of sensations in photography – whether images can elicit the physical sensations of being there for the viewer standing in front of the final print. It is always my goal to make images where you could almost feel the heavy humidity on your skin, hear the leaves rustling, or taste a swamp’s scent wafting through the air.

Could you tell us a few things about the Impossible Works project?

Impossible Works is a nonprofit supported by the Impossible Project, the main manufacturer of instant films today. The mission of Impossible Works is to support artistic projects made with instant films. We accept proposals from anyone looking to use and challenge the instant medium.

How does it feel taking photographs with a huge, slow and hard-to-move analog camera in an age when people upload thousands of pictures a second on social media that it takes them all of a second to frame, and their friends all of another second to “like”?

The process of working at 20×24 definitely creates a different kind of image, in the attention that you and your subjects inherently end up giving during a shoot.

The final prints can be shared as you work, in all of their incredible scale and detail, which transforms the building of an image. While this can partly be equated to sharing digital files online or during a shoot, it’s pretty easy to lose the fine, subtle details of an image looking at it on a glowing screen or on the back of a digital camera.

I do share some of my images online in similar ways to many digital photographers, but only as a teaser, not as an end to themselves – I don’t think you can really experience the work until you’re in the room with the original full-size prints.

Do you own any smaller cameras, and, if so, do you like using them?

Yes, quite a few. I use them mostly when I am traveling, which these days is quite often. When I am traveling, I test a lot of Impossible Projects small-format materials on Polaroid SX-70, 680, and 110B cameras, mostly for sketching out ideas.

But in general I’ve gotten quite accustomed to working on a larger ground glass and seeing my images upside down. I think this is the way my brain is wired these days.

Photographer offers glimpse into Lebanon’s paradise lost

By Harry van Versendaal

Two black IKEA-style chairs sitting empty on a balcony overlooking a bombarded apartment building, a black Mercedes, partly covered by a tablecloth in an empty lot next to a derelict building, a tangle of trees sprouting through the floorboards of a bullet-riddled church.

Demetris Koilalous does not pretend to be a documentary photographer. “My style of photography is intrinsically connected to the way I see the world. A beautiful landscape, for example, does not interest me — I don’t even lift my camera,” he says, sitting on the sofa of his colorful apartment in the northern Athens suburb of Halandri.

This jagged juxtaposition of the mundane with the war-torn is what the 50-year-old photographer seeks to bring out in his photo exhibition of present-day Lebanon currently on display at the Museum of Photography, located in a former warehouse designed by Eli Modiano in the northern port city of Thessaloniki and the only Greek institution exclusively dedicated to the medium.

Koilalous spent 18 hectic days last year in the Land of the Cedars on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He was on a photographic assignment commissioned by the museum which sent five professionals to the Middle East as part of a Greek Culture Ministry program. Featuring some 200 images shot in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Qatar, Lebanon, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, “Oriented and Disoriented in the Middle East,” will run through May 13.

Intrigued by the delicate balance found in Mideast societies, Koilalous went to Lebanon intentionally seeking out places that would illustrate a country on the brink — “a rather European preconception,” he admits. Carrying a Canon DSLR camera, he looked for places where battles took place, where massacres occurred, where people were driven out of their homes, places that formed the border between different minorities.

“At some point during the second day, I was in the center of Lebanon and I happened upon this church that was totally pockmarked by bullets; you know Beirut, it’s all cement, ruins, torn-down houses, rebuilt houses, there are really modern buildings and not much green at all. And so suddenly I see this incredible anarchic greenery. It was an old church, it didn’t have a roof, and when you walked inside it was like walking through a forest. And that’s when I remembered another photographer’s project called ’Paradise Lost.’ And it just kept going through my mind that there is a lost paradise over there. This country that’s living its very own anti-paradise,” he says, explaining the inspiration behind the somewhat awkward project title.

Conflict-prone Lebanon is split along sectarian lines that dictate not only politics but also living arrangements and standards of living. The 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 cost an estimated 150,000 lives while many more were wounded or displaced. Originally fought between Christian militias and leftists allied with the Palestinians, the conflict triggered a wide array of clashes as Syria, Israel and others stepped into the fray. Social peace remains fragile and contemporary events are so disputed that school history books stop at independence from France in 1943.

Understandably, time pressure was not the only problem Koilalous had to deal with. Security guards were constantly monitoring his movements and the photographs he was taking. He was armed with documents from the Greek Embassy in Lebanon, the Museum of Photography, and Greece’s Culture Ministry. He also had written permission from Lebanon’s Information Ministry, police force and military to take pictures in public spaces. But often he would find out these were not enough.

“There’s this hotel called the Monroe with a great view of the sea where I wanted to take a shot. So I showed them all my papers. The guy responds that the paper says I am allowed to take pictures inside Beirut but nothing about overhead shots,” he says, explaining that it was not army officials but private security guards that would give him the most trouble.

“If I were his cousin he would have let me in — just like in Greece. But because I took the legal route he wouldn’t let me. Some people find an excuse to exercise the little power they have left. A security guard trying to impose his own interpretation of a ministry document in order to legitimize his position.”

Born in Athens in 1962, Koilalous initially studied urban planning in Edinburgh and geography at the London School of Economics before gravitating to photography. It was only after he started to teach the craft about 10 years ago, he says, that he began to take good photographs. First noticed thanks to the dreamlike quality of the black-and-white panoramic landscapes of “Deja vu,” showcased in the 2008 PhotoBiennale, Koilalous has steadily evolved with more sharply focused work. His open-ended “Growth” project, a rather lyrical commentary on the changing landscape along Greece’s national highways, has shown him to be a good master of color and symbolism.

Koilalous keeps no secret of his wide range of influences — from the activist photojournalism of Sebastiao Salgado and the iconic images of Magnum master Josef Koudelka, to outsider photographer Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin, to Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth of the Dusseldorf school. “It’s a lot of contrary things. But I gradually came to appreciate the simplicity of photographers like [Andre] Kertesz.”

However, as his experience working as a teacher has shown him, no amount of quality influences and hard work can match a generous dose of talent. “The outcome is a matter of hard work, but instinct is a question of talent. There are people out there who can see through walls. It’s incredible. Some things can be cultivated, particularly some stereotypes — but instinct cannot.”

Skeptics often complain that contemporary art, particularly its conceptual genre, has lowered the bar to the point where actual talent is made redundant. If you want to succeed, the argument goes, make sure you have good market connections. The argument seems to strike a rather emotional chord with Koilalous, who is ready to defend his more conceptual counterparts.

“I am not denying the fact that the market defines things to a certain extent, but it’s bulls**t to say that art is determined by curators. The price of an artwork is one thing, its value however is quite another. It’s good that a photograph can sell for a lot of money. The more people want a photograph, the more its price will rise. Something that nobody wants to buy will never sell,” he says before going on to deconstruct a couple of Gursky photos from a Dusseldorf school photo book.

The German artist’s “Rhine II,” a picture of the gray river under gray skies, last year fetched a record 4.3 million dollars at a Christie’s auction in New York. The image, described by Gursky as “an allegorical picture about the meaning of life and how things are,” was digitally manipulated to leave out elements that bothered him. Many found the photo “overrated.” Writing for the Guardian, Maev Kennedy called it a ”sludgy image of desolate, featureless landscape.”

“It’s immature to say that Gursky, whose works hang in MoMa, Berlin and the Tate Modern, is a creation of marketing. Only someone with an inferiority complex would claim that.”

It’s not easy being a pioneer. If you want to use photography to talk about new things, Koilalous suggests, you have to overcome the huge obstacle that is reality. As a photographer who is an artist, you have to make use of what is commonly perceived as reality and illustrate it in a subjective way, but still communicate it to the audience, he says. “This is an important part in photography that you need to get used to.”

One of the “anti-paradise” pictures depicts a pair of empty armchairs flanking a little round table with decorative objects — including a statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle. His intent, Koilalous explains, was not a comment on religiosity or kitsch, but rather an allegory on the absence of dialogue in the divided country. “This is what I am trying to say. I am not sure if this will resonate with the audience at all. But I want my images to make people think twice.”

Girls on film

By Harry van Versendaal

A Korean schoolgirl is about to lose a finger in a cruel initiation rite; a line of marching students willingly commit mass suicide wading into the waters of a river; two girls brace for a duel on a rooftop.

These are snippets from “Girls in Uniform,” an art project crafted by Hyun-Jin Kwak, part of which went on display this month at the Technopolis cultural complex in Athens.

Enigmatic and captivating, the images seem to capture the tension between the individual and the collective, the interaction between the subject and the structures of power that come to shape the former’s norms and behavior.

Kwak’s schoolgirls are subjected to systemic power. But, operating from inside the cracks in the system, they too get a chance to exercise their own power on others. Depicted are acts of sexual experimentation, cryptic rituals and psychological and physical violence.

The uniform, tightly wrapped around the body as well as the mind, becomes a tool and symbol of constraint — yet, at the same time, also a shield offering that cozy sense of belonging. This is, after all, a paradoxical world that we live in.

Born in South Korea in 1974, Kwak now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Launched in 2003, “Girls in Uniform” is an ongoing project that includes series of photographs, sculptures, installations and video works, some of which are still in the planning stages. Shown in the context of the Athens Photo Festival at Technopolis, a former gas factory on Pireos Street, Kwak’s exhibition was organized by the Swedish Institute in Athens and curated by Jan-Erik Lundstrom.

Kwak spoke talks here about the allegorical universe of her girls in uniform.

The images of your “Girls in Uniform” project are beautiful but unsettling. They could be read as an attempt to capture the tension between the individual and the collective, between free will and control. What message are you trying to get across?

Personally, I don’t think they are so disturbing. I guess it’s more about how actions and behavior deviate from what we expect from these young female subjects. On a more general level, I think the question of social relationships between individuals and their environment appears in quite different shapes in every society. My project is based on questions about the nature of social relationships between the individual and society, and how these are reflected in different social environments. I am interested in the sociological aspects of being and being formed as an individual, and in the question of identity.

I would assume that the uniforms worn by your characters in the pictures serve as a metaphor — the uniform in the mind, as it were.

Yes, that’s true: The girls serve partly as a metaphor for someone or something in transition; so it doesn’t have to be about age, it is also about time. These subjects are incomplete and unstable, but highly charged.

The uniform stands for uniformity, conformity and repression. At the same time, anonymity can give you a sense of security and be a driving force behind action.

There is a strong conflictual element between the two, but also a possibility to establish alliances in complicated conditions.

Why are there only women in your pictures?

I realized that I created a kind of group of alpha beings and there was no room or necessity for both genders in this project. Since I am one, I can fully grasp women as social and political beings and use this as a main subject and put it in such a context. I do not have the same confidence with men as such a subject.

Is your theme a bridge that connects your two backgrounds — East Asian and Northern European? Does the power to conform exist in both societies/cultures but merely in different forms?

There are different uniforms and codes of conduct that we all carry in any society and culture. The school uniform is a metaphor for a larger concept.

Meanwhile, the project is also a reflection of my biography. The methods and order I have used, the choice of location might say something about me. In the beginning, I tried to reconstruct the mental stages and patterns of behavior in Korean society. These were influenced by the relationship between rapid economic growth and ethics in recent Korean history. The first phase of the project relates to the South Korean educational system and the transition which occurred during the democratization of the country in the early 1980s. The Korean school uniform for girls allowed for an investigation into the processes of socialization, where different aspects of power structures, oppression, transgressions and an awakening sexuality were staged and made to confront each other. These aspects reflected, to varying degrees, the breaking points between the sternly authoritative and repressive system and the country’s recent openness at a time of strong economic and technological development, which also allowed for an individualistic consumer culture and an expansive cultural life.

As relations between the individual, the uniform (second identity) and society are not an exclusively Korean, or Asian, concern, the work acquired a new and expanded geographic and psychological meaning in its later phases. Even though school uniforms exist all over the world, and are actually more of a rule than an exception, their role within my project has become more and more metaphorical. This later part of “Girls in Uniform” also reflects my own biography, as my art is based in Sweden in order to explore environments in Europe.

In the photographs we see constructions of events/narratives that are parallel to the commonplace. Many of the locations/scenes in my works can refer to Heterotopia. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental.

These choices of settings are central. I want the photographs to possess a theatrical quality at the same time as they refer to documentary (or psychological portraits). More and more, the project has developed into studies of elements in settings where the historical and architectural aspects are of considerable importance.

In my photographic staging at these locations, my use of models, props and the situations they are involved in are all employed in relation to the history of the site, for deeper relations between the story line and its visualization.

If your work is indeed a critique of conformity and identity formation in modern societies, I guess a counterargument would be that top-down identity-building provides some of that necessary glue that keeps a society together.

This is very true. As one who was born and raised in one culture while residing in a very different one, I may see more of these differences and problems. The very idea of this difference may be the starting point of the project.

I am not trying to say one is better than the other. Striking a balance between these seems quite a utopian idea at times.

But sometimes, what we may think as necessary glue to keep things together can easily turn into concrete that sucks you in and buries you.

Finally, it looks like you take a lot of time and effort in selecting your locations and staging your shots. Does that not contradict your message, in some way?

My choice of locations is carefully made, as you say. They do not only serve as a backdrop, but also help create certain emotions by using the atmosphere and possibly also the history of the site. I don’t think this can be done in any other way, nor is it contradictory. On the contrary, I believe it largely contributes to the theme.

Yasser Alwan: Photographer with a cause

By Harry van Versendaal

I like getting lost. It’s the best way to really get to know a city,” explained Yasser Alwan as he arrived outside a Thessaloniki bar some 30 minutes after our agreed time. After 17 years in Cairo, the 47-year-old photographer certainly knows the streets of the Egyptian metropolis as well as any homegrown resident.

Born in Nigeria to Iraqi parents, Alwan told me he lived in Lebanon and Iraq before moving with his parents to New York in the early 1970s. His Iraqi-American background was “volatile enough” for him to decide to leave the US in 1992. He said he hadn’t been back since.

Standing in the tradition of documentary art photography, Alwan was in Greece this weekend for the inauguration of “Facing Mirrors,” an exhibition of 130 portraits at the northern port city’s Museum of Photography that is also showcasing works by Middle East artists Gilbert Hage, Youssef Nabil, Hrair Sarkissian and Raed Yassin.

During a panel discussion in Thessaloniki, Alwan, an outspoken critic of the Mubarak regime who played an active role in the January uprisings, responded to questions about his work and political developments in Egypt. Here is an excerpt of the discussion.

My images are as artless as possible. Yes, I think about balance and composition. But what I am mostly interested in is honest human contact. I am not interested in spectacle or a visual experience. I am interested in an all-round experience and in celebrating the people I take photographs of.

It’s probably the most produced item in the world today, and it’s the easiest thing to make: a picture. Of, course, it is also the easiest thing to delete. Any picture made for public space — all the print media, television and the Internet — has a life of 24 hours; and then the next day comes and new images are needed. Images made for public use are made in the millions daily. How possible is it to make images that convey more than just a blink of an eye view of the world? I think it’s impossible.

In the days of painting portraiture, when a painter would have a subject sit for him maybe days or weeks, there was a relationship that was established. A painter would come to know a person because of a connection between eye, brain, spine, hand, canvas — and then the connection back to the person, and that connection was happening hundreds of times during a particular sitting. But photography sort of eliminated that necessity. I think photography brought about a change in consciousness.

I have an ethical obligation when I make a portrait of someone, which is to convey something of the truth. And the only way that I feel I can do that is if I spend time with the people, with that environment. I would like you to believe that my photographs from Tahrir are more real [than those that appeared on the media]. I understand that all images are constructed regardless of whether you believe they are more real or not. But I do want to get across that my pictures are more real and more honest. That does not make the art go away. But part of the art is to get you to suspend your disbelief.

Egyptians react quite forcefully to my work, but usually in a negative way. The pictures hurt them but that is absolutely not my intention.

Portraits require a sense of social mobility. Historically, the people who had portraits made of themselves were people who were moving up in the world or who were already at the very top by birth. Ordinary people had no portraits except for minor examples from the beginning of the history of portraiture 5,000-6,000 years ago.

Each person is different. Sometimes I make a picture of someone in an hour and it turns out well, and sometimes I try for months and it never works. Photographing in the streets in Cairo is extremely difficult. You have to remember we live in a police state. I have been in jail many times; I have been taken to the State Security Headquarters just for taking pictures. So the environment is not a comfortable one for a photographer like myself to work in. The state is terrified of images like mine. They don’t want such images to be seen by the population of Egypt because they have a vested interest in controlling the image. Ninety-nine percent of the images that you see of Egypt are the Nile and the Pyramids, Luxor and Aswan — by design. It’s been a very difficult way of working, but it’s the only way of working: that is, to get people to overcome their own fears and prejudices about what a picture is.

I’ve been stopped by the police at least a hundred times in Egypt over the last 17 years. Also people will immediately accuse me of being a spy, I am a foreigner, I don’t speak the Egyptian dialect like an Egyptian. If I don’t manage the situation well it can turn into 15 people taking me by the arms to a police station.

[Women are] an invisibility that I’ve reproduced. Most unfortunately. It is part of the culture that I’ve swallowed myself. It’s something that I am dying to do. I’ve tried to work with women’s organizations to be able to gain access to women, it’s been very difficult for me to photograph the ordinary average nobody who is a woman. I am very able to photograph the upper classes and I have. But the ordinary average woman is much more sensitive about her image and it would take somebody much smarter than myself or a woman photographer.

Religion doesn’t come into play at all in my work. I’m working on a project about the Coptic community in Egypt. It’s an extremely sensitive issue, but that’s where my interest would be, rather than Islam.

I’d like to use the momentous events of January-February 2011 in Tahrir Square. I’ve lived in Egypt for 17 years and I’ve been going to Egypt for 25 and it was beyond my imagination to believe that what happened did happen. The uprising brought the social media to the fore. Videos and photographs that ordinary people have been making on their mobile telephones have been put on the Internet, they are being gathered by the American University in Cairo, which is trying to compile an archive of images, sound and video of the revolution. We have not removed the system. But that’s coming, inshallah. However, there has been a public space that has been carved out in Egypt and that public space is not going to be given up. Graffiti, and most of the graffiti is politically oriented, and some of it very refined, is throughout the streets of Cairo. The Ministry of Interior is now buying paint by the ton and as soon as the graffiti is done they have troops of people to paint over it.

I predict we are going to have another confrontation, hopefully sooner rather than later, but no more than two years from now. And it will be bloody.

Images of the future

By Harry van Versendaal

It has been a tough year for the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, as severe budget cuts and organizational problems jeopardized this year’s PhotoBiennale and the very survival of the institution. Relieved, even proud of having pulled off the event, museum director Vangelis Ioakimidis speaks to Athens Plus.

You’ve had a hard year, with financial difficulties. What are the biggest compromises you have had to make?

We had to ask almost all the photographers to pay the cost of setting up the exhibitions, we had to use Mylos instead of the, larger, port sites, and we had to depend on a very small staff.

Are you satisfied with the outcome?

I believe the artistic result has been of a high quality and has not affected our reputation. Our problems are of an organizational and financial nature.

What are the prospects?

In June and July we will know if we will be eligible for EU subsidies; if we are, then this will improve prospects until September. Our application is ready for evaluation. In that case we might be able to enter the festival for 2012 and 2014. The museum still has problems with operating costs, which although small, are too much for us.

What about the possibility of merging with the State Museum of Contemporary Art?

We don’t even want to think about it. It would be a great blow for us.

Is “place,” this year’s theme, not too loose a concept?

Well, place is everything, just as time (the theme of the 2008 PhotoBiennale) is everything. It is everything, but it is also something.

Some of the captions seem to infuse the photographs with meaning that is not there or which was not the photographer’s intention. What is your opinion?

Yes, that’s so. That’s a difficult issue: the connection between the work of art and the words. It calls for caution.

Doesn’t that apply to the photograph itself? Has the rise of post-modernism made it hard to distinguish a treasure from rubbish. Has subjectivity been harmful?

We have tried to show different styles, and the dimension of photography, whether narrative, visual and conceptual or completely objective. At the same time, we have tried to show current trends.

Has the digital revolution done more harm than good to photography? Now nearly everyone can be a photographer.

This has always been a problem, that anyone can call himself a creative photographer – just as any journalist might think he is a creative writer. But it is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If the public are able to take their own photographs, they will be more open to photography itself.

Is there a possibility that photography will go the same way as music, where file-swapping and data overload have harmed the quality and shelf-life of music. People hear far more, pay less attention and move on quickly to the next thing. Some things become very small very quickly.

It was a blow to music because music was a whole industry. Photography, at least the way we approach it, is not. At any rate, photography is not losing its public, it is gaining it. The problem is with the creators; whether they evolve and whether the system around them helps them evolve. I have the impression that they are evolving. And I believe that Greeks too are evolving – but slowly.

So to finish more or less where we started. What role can a museum play in a crisis? Should we have other priorities instead of paying to see photographs?

In the world we live, if we don’t have feelings and senses, we can’t exist. Just as we need food, we must have something to make us continue wondering; intellectual food. It isn’t a luxury, but one of the three main elements in our existence. Just as we need our health to get around, education to learn how to think and earn a living, so we need things to inspire us. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Man vs nature

Motionteam/Ververidis

By Harry van Versendaal

Nikos Markou, widely considered as the link between the old and the new generation of Greek photographers, spoke to Athens Plus about his 10-year project, “Topos: Nuances of Space,” currently on show at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography.

Apart from the relationship between man and the environment, what else links these photographs?

This exhibition is the result of the most conscious part of my work which has been in the making for about a decade, when I started delving into this place that is Greece.

What I consider “place” is living space, one that you feel you belong to and which for me, is the place you feel the need to protect.

Just because you were born in Greece doesn’t mean that your “place” is necessarily Greece – I don’t see it like that. Some people like to travel and feel they belong everywhere. I have a bond with the country.

How do you choose your subjects?

There is no rule. Photography is a part of my life – it is a need and I do nothing more than record situations that interest me and which I want to keep, to record on film.

Your captions given no information about the location; there are only dates. Is that your own choice?

Yes. I don’t think the specific location is important. The date is simply a personal diary, although these photographs do not constitute a diary.

There are no close-ups, but mainly small figures in large landscapes. The scale often makes the landscapes seem larger than they actually are.

I’m interested in a general view of the place I decide to photograph, whether urban or natural, although the latter in the sense of pure nature is not easy to find – there is always some form of human intervention, whether a pylon or a cultivated field, and that’s why I rarely choose a purely natural landscape; but what often interests me are the details that we are not used to observing in our everyday lives.

So I am interested in the general, as long as there is something there – it is hard to explain what that something is that makes me lift up my camera – or not – but I also like to look for details.

Now with regard to people – since I started out photographing people in my first two projects, mainly documentary photography, that lasted four years and then stopped suddenly. After that I decided that people as personalities didn’t interest me; what interests me is what people create or destroy within their environment, since that is what remains. It is difficult for me to even notice such images now – I have ruled out that kind of photography.

I think the most important thing for me is the place in which we live, how we act upon it, usually in a negative way unfortunately, and what we are handing down to the next generation

Your photographs look as if they have been taken in the late afternoon, or after rain. Why don’t you make use of the bright Mediterranean light?

Generally I don’t like blue skies – in photographs, I mean. Of course that affects me more generally. The times I choose to work are usually on cloudy days or in the late afternoon.

Out of space

By Harry van Versendaal

The Photography Museum of Thessaloniki, the country’s only museum dedicated to the craft, is currently organizing the 21st International Photography Meeting, now known as the PhotoBiennale, which is scheduled to run through September.

Having grown in size and prestige over the past few years, the PhotoBiennale has also become more outward-looking, forging ties with foreign institutions and festivals while introducing a number of welcome initiatives, such as master classes and portfolio reviews.

The event, which this is year dedicated to the theme of “place,” spans over 58 group and solo exhibitions and slideshow projections by 188 photographers from 25 countries. You can browse through them at some 35 galleries and exhibition centers in Thessaloniki. Organizers plan to showcase some of the work in other Greek towns later in the year.

This year’s highlights include Nikos Markou’s “Topos: Nuances of Space,” a collection of multilayered and often ambiguous pictures of urban and natural landscapes that depict man’s impact on nature – only subtly so. Markou’s work, which you will find at the museum’s beautiful brick-and-steel premises on the waterfront (Warehouse A, Thessaloniki port complex), is complemented by Inge Rambow’s “Niemandsland.” The stunning images of industrial sites turned wastelands shot by the 70-year-old German highlight the devastating effect of humankind on their natural environment.

Both exhibitions run through August 31.

Drive up to the Byzantine Castle and Seven Towers Prison (“Yenti Koule”) on the upper side of town to see “Execution Squares” by Damascus-born Hrair Sarkissian. The apparent innocuousness of these empty Syrian squares can be misleading for, as the title suggests, they serve as public execution grounds for criminals sentenced to death. Shows at the Seven Towers Prison wrap up on June 28.

The launch of the PhotoBiennale is an achievement in itself, organizers said, as the museum had to brave severe budget cuts and organizational snags. The Photography Museum of Thessaloniki, which has come under pressure to merge with the larger but troubled State Museum of Contemporary Art, has turned to the European Union for subsidies.

Fresh funding will be crucial for organizing the follow-up to this event, scheduled for 2012, which is set to complete the time/place/discourse trilogy.

More at Mylos

Mylos (56 Andreou Georgiou), at the western end of town, this year hosts a number of exhibitions including Pavlos Fysakis’s melancholy “Land Ends” project. The work, a product of the photographer’s extensive wandering at the four edges of Europe – Norway, Greece, Portugal and Russia – explores quasi-existential questions about the concept of borders and the nature of European identity.

“Homeland” by Turkey’s Serkan Taycan is in similar vein, being a semiautobiographical work, bringing together images of contemporary Turkey and snapshots from the largely impoverished region of eastern Anatolia, where the photographer grew up.

New York photographer Leah Tepper Byrne documents The Children’s Village, a 150-year-old residential treatment center and alternative site to incarceration for more than 200 boys, aged 6 to 21, in upstate New York. Moving, albeit sometimes disturbing, the images in “Still Lives“ explore youths caught between isolation and healing.

A more editorial work, Nikos Pilos’s “The Invisible Wall Line” revisits Berlin 20 years after the fall of the Wall, while in “Sanalika” (the Turkish word for virtual world) Alexandros Avramidis exposes the plastic but colorful – and often hilariously tacky – aspects of a consumption-driven world.

Exhibitions at Mylos will be showcased until July 31.

For more information visit: http://www.photobiennale.gr

Western blues

By Harry van Versendaal

It’s hard not to feel a wee bit jealous of Nysos Vasilopoulos. The 34-year-old photographer has already had a number of solo exhibitions in Berlin, which he calls home for the past seven years, collaborated with dance and theater troupes there and in Athens, even worked on a short film that has been screened at the International Short Film Festival in Drama. So it comes a bit as a surprise that, when it comes to taking pictures, his main passion and craft, this independent and talented young man has chosen to focus on the more poignant aspects of the human psyche. Melancholy, loneliness and introversion are the words mostly associated with the work of Patra-born Vasilopoulos, whose work has already drawn comparisons to that of Michael Ackerman. “Street Sonnets,” an exhibition of 57 black-and-white photographs shot in Berlin and other European capitals between 2002 and 2009, is currently on show at the Photography Museum of Thessaloniki. Athens Plus met with Vasilopoulos at the premises of this seaside, cozy industrial building.

As a photographer you bear the label of “melancholy” and “loneliness.” Is it something that has been imposed on you, or is it something that you’ve tried to bring out with your work?

No, it’s not something that has been imposed on me. Rather, it’s a statement that I myself have used. In recent years, I have been searching for man’s loneliness, introversion and isolation. Whether I found myself in Athens, Berlin, London or Paris I was searching for man. Not in fancy parties, colors and lights but rather in places where we all exist in our daily lives. In some way, it was a reflection of my own thoughts and feelings about modern man, the modern Western man.

Was it man’s loneliness or solitude? Or, perhaps, both?

Both, yes.

Does art thrive on melancholy?

Yes. I believe art, art at its core, is tough. It won’t pet you, it won’t lie to you. Art is not some big party but something esoteric that we all share. It’s all about who people and how much they work on it.

Do these rough urbanscapes give you what you are looking for? After all, shooting in Athens or Berlin is one thing, while shooting in postcard-pretty Paris or Amsterdam is quite another.

I see what you mean but if you are looking for man you will find man regardless where you may be. A lonely setting can be found in any city. In any western city you’ll always find a coffee-place with a man sitting in a moment of silence, just like my photograph at the El Prado foyer. Funny thing is, this man was joined by three ladies right after I clicked. In a way, that is the illusion of photography. The photographer captures the moment. What happens before or after that moment is a whole different story.

Is photography melancholy by nature? I mean the way it captures the moment that is forever lost.

I think so. You freeze time and you pass it into the future; it’s an illusion. But there is also something melancholy about trying to freeze reality.

Some of your photos appear to have been staged.

Yes, I do stage some of them. When I was younger, I used to say: “Yes, this is a very beautiful photograph but it is staged, so I don’t like it.” With time you realize that this does not matter, because you can stage something or you can have something completely spontaneous and still get the same power. The point is to transcend form and create something that will stand in time.

Are there any photographers who have influenced your work?

Yes, I have delved into the work of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and [Andre] Kertesz.

You have shot thousands of pictures. How can you tell a really good photograph from a not-so-good one?

My criterion is if a photograph that I shot in 2002 still does it for me today. A good photograph is one that can stand the test of time. But it’s also about you, what you want to say. Sometimes you may use a photograph to test your own doubt toward it. I am not so sure about all these photographs [on display here]. I still have doubts about some of them.

What is your favorite photo in this exhibition?

I really like the one at the Louvre statues. It gives me a melancholic feeling. These statues were made to stand under the sun and we wrapped them in plastic and placed them one next to the other; they look haunted. It’s like people who have lost their freedom.

You have lived in Berlin for the past seven years. Have you ever thought of coming back?

I don’t feel like a migrant. I mean, I can be here and be in Berlin or anywhere else at the same time. I love Berlin; it’s my base, my daily life. That does not mean to stay I plan to live there forever. Just like I got on a plane and left, the same could one day happen again, this time to another destination.

PROFILE

Nysos Vasilopoulos studied photography, journalism and history of European civilization in Athens before moving to Berlin, where he studied film direction at the Berlin Kaskeline Filmakademie. He has experienced with other art forms and collaborated with sculptor Clavie Duson, musician Chris Jarrett and poet Ernesto Estrella.

Back to the roots

By Harry van Versendaal

It’s hard to decide what to make of Pavlos Kozalidis. If nothing else, this 49-year-old photographer is a curious man who lives to click.

Born in Piraeus before moving to Canada, Kozalidis grew up listening to the nostalgic stories of his aunt, an ethnic Greek from Ordu, a town in the conflict-prone Black Sea region, who was forced to migrate first to America and then, having been displaced from Ordu for a second time, to Greece.

When he first laid hands on an SLR camera in the late 1980s, Kozalidis started to travel. Initially he wandered in India and Central Asia, but curiosity about his origins prompted him to trace the roots of his family. Between 1995 and 2003 he traveled from Turkey and Georgia to Russia and Ukraine at least once a year. He did so with scarce resources, mostly riding on dilapidated buses and staying at cheap hotels – a habit that only added to the experience. “It’s better to have a small seat next to a big window than a comfortable seat beside a tiny window,” Kozalidis says in what seems to translate as a life-rule.

Somewhere along the way his work won support from the Benaki Museum in Athens, which in 2008 for the first time made public a small part of the growing material. “Searching for a Lost Homeland,” some 60 black-and-white photos taken during his Black Sea journeys, is currently being showcased at the Photography Museum of Thessaloniki through April 18.

Kozalidis is not a technical photographer and does not pretend otherwise. “I make a lot of mistakes,” he tells Athens Plus in an interview at the attractive brick and steel warehouse building that houses the museum.

But Kozalidis’s candid admission is hard to believe as you stare at this arresting piece of work documenting the lives and customs of the Pontian Greeks who stayed behind.

Not bad for someone who used to steal magazine pictures from his local dentist office.

Keeping needs simple

Do you have a regular job?

No, no. I have my own means, not a lot, but I still have the capability after so many years to do 16 hours third class on a third class bus on a third class road. I don’t need a lot of money. I spend more money every day on film than my hotel room. And I try to stretch whatever I have. I would gladly spend anything I have to buy film or a ticket to travel by road or by plane.

Do you teach?

No, I am not a teacher. I can’t teach people. You can teach somebody the tricks of photography. It’s kind of like juggling. You can learn to be a good juggler, but if there is no heart in what you’re looking at then… it’s like a cold coke on a sunny day. After a while you start feeling thirsty again.

I think everybody wants to see something true, even when you go to see all that art kind of photography; sometimes I must admit I get a little bit jealous of the attention it gets because it’s new. My work is passé, my photographs are kind of “classic.”

Why did you hold on to this material for so long? Why didn’t you publish anything for 20 years?

To publish something you need time. And that time takes you away from the clicking, the development. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I still do. I’m so bad that I used to cut up my negatives and then try to pick out something I wanted. I didn’t go to photography school. It’s sort of something that I picked up and in a way saved myself from myself. There’s two ways, you know, up and down.

I can now carry 36 kilos of film and 10 kilos of camera equipment, plus another 20 kilos in my bag. All the rest,  looking at it, I can do later.

Are you not afraid that it may no longer be relevant?

It’s just a journey. A lot of people are on a journey and they don’t leave anything. At least mine, even if it’s not relevant, is still something. The rest is ego. You want to be like “forever,” your work to be “forever.”

I am not finished with these places; China, Asia, Africa, South America, I am not finished. I’ll never finish. I just did 10,000 kilometers on a third class bus on a road in Africa; the entire trip took four-and-a-half months. And now I am leaving in ten days. I can do it now. But at some point I won’t be able to. That’s why I didn’t show it. Not because I didn’t want to. I mean I want people to see it. It’s wonderful when you come up to me and saw “wow.” It’s nice because it’s really extra. It’s like having a girlfriend and you take her out and everybody goes “wow she’s really beautiful.” It’s really nice because for a long time you thought only you saw her as beautiful. Everything has it’s time. It’s like flowers, they don’t all bloom at the same time. But the thing is… I’ve made mistakes and I continue to make mistakes and I say a lot of romantic cuckoo things. But I am irrelevant, I don’t make these things. I just see some things because they are good photographs. I don’t think I am particularly talented photographically. I just have an ability to get close to people.

Can you tell us about your Black Sea journey? Why did you go there?

It had to do with my aunt and her stories because she was born there. And in the exodus some went to New York, some went to Russia, some went to Japan. It was a big family. She kept telling me there was a house there which still stands now and I just went back. And I would go by road from Athens, I would get on a bus, a Georgian bus, and I would do the whole journey through Istanbul, 3 days, 4 days if it didn’t break down. And then I would meet people and they would speak my grandmother’s language. And that was really cool. And it was like you made friends after 4 days because you wake up and you have breakfast, chicken, sausages, bread, Russian cigarettes, and vodka, vodka, vodka.

Camera is my journal basically. It is my life, but it is also the life of the other people that I see. That’s what I am basically doing. Journaling others but using my own means.

Did you expect to find something specific?

It didn’t start out that way. There was no focal point. At some point you collect and collect and collect and after 5 years of doing it you start seeing things happening. I photograph everything basically. I go somewhere and I photograph everything. I don’t go there with an idea. Sometimes I envy people who do that and they come up with wonderful work, but very few. I just observe. I just look and anything that makes visual sense I go to it. But it has to have spirit, it has to be not happy but dignified.

The subconscious playing with the image

Do you ever stage your photographs or are they spontaneous?

That’s a hard question because it’s full of lies and truths in the sense that any photographer will say “ah everybody stages.” Look at W. Eugene Smith’s photo essay “Spanish village,” it’s basically all staged. But it’s the end result that counts. As for myself… if there were things in the photograph that were still, that weren’t moving, and I put a human being there, a child basically, would I do it? Yes. But in the end it’s how I feel about what I have to show when I am at the table by myself and picking them out, what truths I want to say.

But you do seem to want a human element in your pictures.

This has to be. I read somewhere that every time you look at a photograph, subconsciously you look for a human figure. It’s kind of cool – you just don’t know you’re doing it. I basically have to act when I photograph, because I don’t want them to be looking at me. If there is a scene, I pretend that I am waiting, you know looking at my watch, while also waiting for them to calm down, so that I can enter their space. I try to go close. I don’t know if it is “to tell the truth” and all that stuff. I don’t know what that means. I just go because it’s interesting. I am there. I go to get something to eat and something beautiful appears in front of me. And I photograph, then I move on. And no eye contact.

In the Black Sea project I was cheating simply because I was a Pontian Greek, I was from these people. I understood some of their dialect which helped. I was Orthodox. I was Greece to them. I was Greece coming to see them because they couldn’t go to Greece for one reason or another, which was great because I was the pasha of the village. I was like the Martian everybody comes and pokes at, to see if he knows any tricks. But there was the other side too; all their complaints and all their problems, no doctors, no medicine, no school for their kids. And I did not go there to change the situation, but I lived with them. I ate a lot of water potatoes in those years. It was right after Russia had collapse. There were buildings that had just stopped in time, farming equipment that stood in the middle of the field. German too, no Mickey Mouse Chinese stuff. German, beautiful machinery, stopped. People just left. You would go to a village and you would see a generation of children and then old people. Because the parents had left for Russia, Kazakhstan, Greece.

Without wanting to superimpose any meaning on your work, some of your photos seem to be conveying values, like dignity. People are poor and hungry but they look dignified.

You can show even misery and ugliness in humane ways. There is a photograph of this couch and water that was seeping from the roof and it was kind of beautiful because of the textures and you could see it was a dump and this poor person had to sit on that seat. I don’t need to go down that path. I would rather show a cold child warming its hands. You can see it’s poor but then you can see another photograph of the table with the food, so you know they do have food. It’s where you point your camera.

Black-and-white versus color

Do you take only black and white photographs?

I have a small body of work that is starting up to be color. I started out with color. I grew up in the States and Canada looking at Life magazine and National Geographic. I used to steal a lot from dentist places, I used to have a collection of stolen dentist office National Geographic and Life magazine photos…

Black and white suits me; let’s say you can lie better. With color you know it’s color. Black and white fits me better like a coat. I don’t know digital. I don’t even know technical photography. To go digital would be a quantum leap. I don’t even know mathematics and times tables and you tell me to do equations. I would be lost. And I like the roll of film. I like coming home after being on the street for 8 hours and dropping the film, cleaning and looking at it and thinking… and I would never be ready to see it right away. I can’t deal with this right-away. I need to collect over years. And when you take it out of the water and you have the light and you look through and you kind of relive everything, it’s a whole process, it’s everything.

Living on the edge

By Harry van Versendaal

It was December 2006 when Pavlos Fysakis caught the ferry to Gavdos, a tiny island located south of its much bigger and more famous neighbor Crete, and Europe’s southernmost spot. It was the first of a number of trips Fysakis made in the course of just over two years that also brought him to the Continent’s other three edges: Nordkapp, in Norway, Portugal’s Cabo da Roca, and the Urals, Europe’s traditional eastern boundary. Armed with two analog cameras, his favorite medium-format Mamiya and a German-made Rolleiflex, Fysakis, an athletic, bespectacled man in his early forties, set out to answer a bag of quasi-existentialist questions: What is it that makes us Europeans? What is it that separates us Europeans from the people on the other side of the border? In fact, what is a border and what does it define? More or less ordinary people like Boris, Nils, Artemis, Maja and Sofie provided Fysakis with some of the answers. It’s these people whom Fysakis describes in “Land Ends,” a collection of pictures from the journey that is out now in bookstores, as “the guardians at Europe’s outer edge, which may, after all, just be its beginnings.”

Tell us a few words about the project. How did it come about? How long did it take to complete?

The thought, the concept of borders, of an end, of lands that are estranged from hope and other such issues nagged at me for years. It had begun brewing inside me also through work, as I spent quite a while on a long-term project for Kathimerini on the Greek Islands in the winter, on islands that are cut off from regular ferry service. This project – without it being about the images but more about the questions it evoked – gave rise to the idea. Also because I like to travel a lot, I began to think about borders, limits, places where one thing ends and another begins. When I eventually pinpointed the idea behind the thought process, I began thinking about Europe, about its borders and where it ends. I did a lot of research. Exploring, searching on the Internet; reading books and the history of Europe took as much time as taking the photographs did.

I began the project in 2006. I did shoots for just over two years and it took another year-and-a-half to write the texts and design the book. I traveled when I could afford it. I went to Gavdos four times, to Portugal twice and once to each of the other locations. I made eight trips in total.

What do these locations have in common?

Despite the many differences between all these places, the one thing they have in common is that they are Europeans on the fringes of the continent – you feel something connecting them, this sense of an end, of reflection, isolation. It is not just about them being forgotten, but about them having forgotten everyone else as well. “We have been forgotten here in Gavdos” is not the point. The point is that they have forgotten us and have no connection to Athens.

Is this a bad thing only?

No. It isn’t just negative. Sure, it has its negative sides. We are accustomed to approaching all these places with a negative mindset and immediately focus on the negative. But the fact that they have put some things behind them is not necessarily bad.

Isn’t this project somewhat melancholy?

Yes, it is. Photography, by its very nature, is a melancholy pursuit, as it deals with things that are past, gone. It’s like a game with memory. For most people, memories are a bit vague and you recall the ones you want. Photographers, however, hang on to them.

What equipment did you carry in your camera bag?

I only used analog cameras: a medium-format Mamiya and a Rolleiflex, and no slides, just film. As far as the lens goes, I always use a wide-angle. The entire book is shot with a 50mm wide-angle lens.

What was the selection process for the locations and subjects?

Once I knew the “what,” the “where” came naturally. It all began to take shape in my mind gradually. I have a little notebook where I jot down my ideas before and during a trip: I need a photograph here, something else there… This means that I have a pretty clear idea of what I need and what I need to avoid before I get to a location. I discover everything with time, such as, for example, the kind of light I want.

I have found a uniform light, a pervading, dull light. It is the same everywhere and it brings together all four corners of Europe. I think that it’s the sky above Europe that joins it and not what we see on the ground. I have found weather that is the same. I traveled only in winter, but during a period of winter that is exactly the same everywhere. It is the same in the south and in the west. For example, I went to Portugal during the deep winter because it is very sunny, and I went north in fall and spring [to achieve the uniform effect].

Do you recall some funny moment from this journey?

At one point in Russia, I was traveling with a friend, Dimitris Michelakis, from Ekaterinburg (Yekaterinburg) – on the border with Kazakhstan – to Vorkouta on the other end of the country, near the Arctic Circle. The weather was bad and our plane never came, so the next day we set off to take th e Trans-Siberian Railway. We went to buy tickets but there was only one left. We were running out of time and couldn’t extend our stay any longer. So we got on the train with just one seat between us and traveled 2,000 kilometers, 16 hours. We met this guy, a manager at a big factory, on the way and he took us under his wing when the ticket inspector came by.

Breaking through and catching the wave

How did you make the crossover from amateur to professional photographer?

I crossed the river in 1995 while I was still a student. I shot my first portrait; it was of a film director for Ta Nea daily, a tiny little picture.

What are the challenges for a professional photographer working in Greece?

Making a living is the biggest challenge, having any kind of job security as a freelance photographer. The conditions are far from ideal. Day in, day out, you have to prove that you are still as good as your last effort. Meanwhile, you also need to find time to do those things that are important to you.

How would you describe your style of photography?

It’s very difficult to create your own signature as a photographer, your own photographic identity. I think I have it; I think someone who sees my photographs knows they’re mine. I would define my style as street photography that has its feet firmly planted in classical photography in a more contemporary manner – overall I would say that it is a very classical style of photography.

Which Greek photographers have influenced you?

Nikos Markou and Yiannis Marapas.

Did you study under them?

Yes, Nikos was my teacher.

You come home and study your work. How do you know that one shot is good and another isn’t?

The images I take don’t have any action, so there are no surprises, there is no “oh, he moved; he fell down; I missed it.” My images have a very strict composition and structure; they are based on fundamentals that you have to have accounted for beforehand. The random – even though I believe that there is something random in every photograph – does not play such a definitive role in my work.

How significant a photograph is, however, also emerges from its narrative. What I mean is that I don’t end up with five or 10 important photographs, but with photographs that are each more important than the other, where one leads up to the other. It’s like telling a story, like putting pages with text in the right order so the words make sense. Basically, that’s the trick. I believe that sometimes an image may not appear very powerful – many people have said this to me – but they are important to me because they are part of a narrative. This is the crux as far as I’m concerned: to serve the narrative.

What is your most memorable mission?

The last trip is always the most important. I also get excited when I start thinking about the next trip.

One exciting story is about a mission to Indonesia for the magazine K, where our boat caught fire in the middle of the Indian Ocean and we nearly drowned. Generally, though, I haven’t been in dangerous situations, nor have I undertaken risky missions in war zones and the like, so I don’t have a lot of crazy stories to tell. I prefer to say that I’ve gone on unusual journeys to ordinary places.

Digital lies

Is Photoshop a friend or an enemy?

I don’t really have any strong feelings about it. I use it only so far as I find necessary. If a photograph needs a lot of work, I’ll do a lot of work on it, and vice versa. You have to be careful not to get carried away. I believe that photography happens when the film is still in the camera. The Photoshopping I do is the kind of processing that would happen in any darkroom using analog technology. But, if I do see something that really bugs me in a photograph, I will take it out. If, for example, I see a electrical cord in the image, I will remove it without a second thought.

Isn’t digital processing a bit like cheating?

I don’t think so. It’s a matter of aesthetic. Here in Greece, you often see lousy editing that kills the image. If you use Photoshop correctly, it helps you; it is a tool. It’s like placing a filter on the lens. It’s not cheating. If you put 70 filters on the lens, well, other than cheating, I’d also say its pointless.

Some argue that Photoshop is necessary in order to bring a photograph closer to what the human eye sees. Is this true?

The lens is not inferior. The lens is not there to do the same thing our eyes do. The lens belongs to the world of the graphic reality. You’re not there to record reality. It is a complete myth that the photographer captures a piece of reality and transports it. It’s just not true.

Is photography an art?

Yes. I believe that question has been amply answered. Susan Sontag said it best when she said that photography is an art, but maybe your photograph is not art.

Have you got your next project?

Yes, I do have a project – what I don’t have is money. I want to do something about religion in the Mediterranean.