DRY LIGHT

JUST SAYING...

2012-02-11T14:37:00.000+02:00

As somebody has pointed out, the so-called Greek bailout is not a bailout of Greece, it's a bailout of foreign banks. Mostly German and French banks.

This pie chart is illuminating. I found it on a site called ZeroHedge, whose strapline is “on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero”.

PICTURING WAR

2012-01-28T22:48:00.000+02:00

The line between photographs and digitised imagery has been getting increasingly blurred for some time now, and the demise (to all practical purpose) of analog photography simply hastened the process; once the initial stage in the creation of an image depends upon the ordering of digitised pixels, it becomes very difficult if not impossible to draw an arbitrary distinction between pixels produced by different methods. Photographs taken with a digital camera are now routinely processed through Photoshop – not, usually, with the intention to deceive, but just because the kind of ‘tidying up’ that used to be done in the darkroom, laboriously and not always skilfully, can now be done in seconds on the screen. At the same time, some photographers have long combined ‘real’ and entirely invented imagery, producing what to even the most expert eye appear to be ‘normal’ photographic prints; the practice is so common in the world of art photography as to hardly be worth remarking on.

Manipulated photographic images of the kind to be seen in galleries and museums are nevertheless still complicated to produce, requiring, perversely enough, a fair amount of skill and manual dexterity. What is disconcerting, on the other hand, is the facility with which certain highly sophisticated kinds of software can now produce entirely virtual imagery which is getting very close to the real thing. That software is routinely found running computer games.

Of the two images, above, the first one is a photograph taken by John Cantlie of snipers from 2/12 Infantry Division looking for insurgents in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan; the one beneath it was produced by computer game Arma 2. How long would it take the average viewer to tell which is the real image? Could he, in fact, do so? OK, once you study the computer-generated image, you start finding the give-away details: the odd knobbly protuberances on the second soldier’s hands, the overly square set of the nearer soldier’s shoulder and the not-quite-convincing stretching of the trouser material at his groin. But you have to look for them. And on the other hand, note the convincing depth-of-field blurring of the background and the apparently accurate rendering of the plant in the left foreground. How long before the increasing sophistication of the software and the corresponding increase in the processing power of home computers levels the field completely? What price reportorial accuracy then?

These images were included, with other similar ones, in a recent online article by the BBC’s picture editor, Phil Coomes. In it, he refers to “a recent Ofcom ruling that ITV misled viewers by airing footage claimed to have been shot by the IRA. Labelled ‘IRA Film 1988’, it was described as film shot by the IRA of its members attempting to down a British Army helicopter in June 1988. However, the pictures were actually taken from a game called”, yes, Arma 2.

CHANGE 18.01.12

2012-01-18T13:38:00.000+02:00

18 January 2012, 7.20 am

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY IN ATHENS UNDER THE OCCUPATION

2012-01-05T15:59:00.002+02:00

The usual view of photography in Greece under the Axis occupation is that it was limited to clandestine or semi-clandestine activity. However, it seems as though at least into 1942, or as long as their stocks of film, paper and chemicals held out, Athens’ ubiquitous street photographers continued to ply their trade, apparently without overmuch interference.

These two examples, discarded by their owner, are small (8.5x6 cm uncropped), deckle-edged prints, of poor quality and in worse condition. External evidence suggests that they were taken in one of the older and poorer neighbourhoods of Athens (or possibly Piraeus). The first one is neatly captioned in ink on the back, “Souvenir of Childhood Memories. Stamatios, Evangelia, Alekos”, and is signed “A. Protopapas 1942”. The second bears a typewritten caption over a scrawled original in pencil: “Souvenir of Friendship / Presented to our friend Alexandros P. Protopapas. So that he will always remember us. / In Friendship / Your friends, Emmanouil Monas & Dionysios Goumas”, and is dated 1942 in ink.

The subjects in both photos look appropriately serious, but both the young boy in the foreground and the man sitting by the wall in the second image seem to be enjoying a laugh.

Η ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ ΔΡΟΜΟΥ ΚΑΤΑ ΤΗΝ ΚΑΤΟΧΗ

Συνήθως εικάζεται ότι η φωτογράφιση κατά τη διάρκεια της Κατοχής ήταν ως επί το πλείστον λαθραία ή κρυφή δραστηριότητα. Φαίνεται όμως ότι τουλάχιστον μέχρι το 1942, ή για όσο διάστημα διέθεταν ακόμα τα απαραίτητα υλικά, οι πλανόδιοι φωτογράφοι των Αθηνών συνέχισαν να εργάζονται χωρίς μεγάλη δυσκολία.

Τα δύο αυτά δείγματα, παραπεταμένα από τον ιδιοκτήτη τους, είναι μικρά τυπώματα (8.5x6 εκ. στο πρωτότυπο), χαμηλής ποιότητας και σε κακή κατάσταση. Το πρώτο φέρει αφιέρωση με μελάνι στην πίσω πλευρά, «Ενθύμιον Παιδικών Αναμνήσεων. Σταμάτιος, Ευαγγελία, Αλέκος» καθώς και την υπογραφή «Α. Πρωτόπαπας 1942». Η δεύτερη φέρει δακτυλογραφημένη αφιέρωση: «Ενθύμιον Φιλλίας / Προς τον φίλλον μας Αλέξανδρον Π. Προτοπαπά. Δια να μας θυμάται πάντα. / Με Φιλλίαν / Οι Φίλλοι σου. / Εμμανουήλ Μονάς & Διονύσιος Γκούμας», και την χρονολογία 1942 με μελάνι.

Τα κεντρικά πρόσωπα και των δύο φωτογραφιών επιδεικνύουν την απαραίτητη για την εποχή σοβαροφάνεια, αλλά τόσο ο κύριος που κάθεται στη διπλανή καρέκλα όσο και το αγόρι στο πρώτο πλάνο της δεύτερης μοιάζουν να το διασκεδάζουν.

A STONE FOR THE NEW YEAR

2012-01-01T11:09:00.000+02:00

“It is also the custom on New Year’s Day to bring a stone or sand into the house. The heaviness of the stone, the number of moss-patches on it, the number of grains in the sand, are all so many guarantees that the crops will be good during the coming year. Thus in the island of Lemnos, when visiting a neighbour or relative on New Year’s Day, one must bring a mossy stone into the house and throw it down saying: “May the purse of the master of the house grow as heavy as this stone.” All stones brought into the house by visiting friends and relations are gathered into a heap and thrown away after eight days. Sometimes the stone is so large that the guest has to carry it on his back; this is considered good luck for the master of the house.”

G. A. Megas, Greek Calendar Customs, Athens 1982, p.46

A VISUAL PRIMER OF THE WORLD

2011-08-26T17:18:00.001+03:00

Primers and hornbooks, their ancestors, which reduce the complexity of the world to a simple catalogue of isolated and familiar objects (the cat, the ball), teach children their first letters. However, they have another role, less apparent but perhaps more crucial: they reveal for the first time the mysterious relationship between object and word, between the material and the abstract (the relationship which René Magritte simultaneously underlined and undermined when he painted a pipe and added a text saying “this is not a pipe”).

Primer illustrations, traditionally in the form of wood engravings and, later, of simple line drawings, are intended to reduce the pictured objects to their simplest lineaments, isolating them from the world: the cat and the ball are in a sense idealised, freed from the bonds of the quotidian and almost achieving the status of platonic archetypes. The primer’s mission is to reject every trace of ambiguity or ambivalence: things as things (res, qua res sunt).

Nevertheless, a photographic primer is in effect a contradiction in terms, since ambiguity is an essential quality of the photographic medium: the photograph always lies. And even when it doesn’t, it remains incapable of fending off the world’s encroachment into the picture space, defeating any attempt at an idealising isolation. And so, despite the apparent certainty of the written word, the image constantly evades meaning: the Ladder merges with its shadow, the Surface flips between transparency and reflection, the humble Towel becomes a gonfalon gilded by the light, the Stairway turns into Jacob’s ladder. The world, says Thoreau, is far wider than we know…

ΕΝΑ ΜΙΚΡΟ ΑΛΦΑΒΗΤΑΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΚΟΣΜΟΥ

Τα αλφαβητάρια, που περιορίζουν την πολυπλοκότητα του κόσμου σε έναν απλό κατάλογο μεμονωμένων και γνώριμων αντικειμένων (το τόπι, η γάτα) μαθαίνουν στα παιδιά τα πρώτα τους γράμματα. Έχουν όμως και έναν άλλο ρόλο, λιγότερο εμφανή αλλά ίσως σημαντικότερο: αποκαλύπτουν για πρώτη φορά τη μυστηριώδη σχέση αντικειμένου και λόγου, υλικού και ιδεατού (τη σχέση που υπογραμμίζει και υποσκάπτει συγχρόνως ο René Magritte, ζωγραφίζοντας μια πίπα και προσθέτοντας από κάτω τη φράση «αυτό δεν είναι πίπα»).

Η εικονογράφηση των αλφαβηταρίων, παραδοσιακά με ξυλογραφίες, αργότερα συνήθως με μονόχρωμα σχέδια, έχει σκοπό να απλουστεύσει στο έπακρων το εικονιζόμενο αντικείμενο, απομονώνοντας το όσο γίνεται περισσότερο από τον κόσμο: το τόπι και η γάτα παρουσιάζονται εξιδανικευμένα, σχεδόν πλατωνικά αρχέτυπα, απαλλαγμένα από τα πολυσύνθετα δεσμά της καθημερινότητας. Αποστολή του αλφαβηταρίου είναι η αποποίηση κάθε αμφισημίας ή αμφιβολίας: τα αντικείμενα ως αντικείμενα (res, qua res sunt).

Εντούτοις, ένα φωτογραφικό αλφαβητάρι αποτελεί ουσιαστικά αντιφατική πρόταση, αφού η αμφισημία είναι εγγενές χαρακτηριστικό του φωτογραφικού μέσου: η φωτογραφία πάντα ψεύδεται. Και όταν ακόμα δεν ψεύδεται, αδυνατεί να αποκλείσει τη βίαιη εισροή του κόσμου μέσα στον χώρο της εικόνας, εκμηδενίζοντας κάθε προσπάθεια απομόνωσης ή εξιδανίκευσης. Έτσι λοιπόν η εικόνα, παρά την υποτιθέμενη αδιαφιλονίκητη σιγουριά που προσφέρει ο γραπτός λόγος (η «λεζάντα», τουτέστιν ο μύθος), συνεχώς υπεκφεύγει: η Σκάλα γίνεται η σκιά της, η Επιφάνεια παίζει ανάμεσα στο διαφανές και το αδιαφανές, η ταπεινή Πετσέτα είναι συγχρόνως φλάμπουρο στο φως, το Κλιμακοστάσιο γίνεται Κλίμακα του Ιακώβ. Ο κόσμος, λέει ο Thoreau, είναι πολύ ευρύτερος απ’ ότι φανταζόμαστε...

THE FROCK COAT AND THE FOUSTANELLA

2011-06-19T13:14:00.000+03:00

Filippos Margaritis, General Christodoulos Hadjipetros, c.1855

Portrait photography from mid-19th century Greece is characterised by an apparent chaos of dress codes and attitudes. At the pinnacle of society, King Otto and Queen Amalia both instituted a policy of cultural cross-dressing, actively encouraging the wearing of Greek national dress at court. A very early group photograph of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting includes the wives and daughters of Greek notables wearing the authentic local costumes of Psara, Spetses, Hydra and Epirus, as well as two German ladies in European court dress. The seated older woman and the young girl to her left are both wearing examples of an outfit designed for the Queen; based on the dress of Nafpaktos, it became known as the “Amalia” and was a favourite of fashionable ladies for as number of decades, eventually acquiring the status of authentic folk dress.

Unsurprisingly, the war of independence remained the defining event in the lives of those who lived through it. As such, it strongly affected how the participants (or would-be participants), saw themselves, and the kind of image they wanted to project. We can see this in the relatively large number of portraits from the 1850s and 1860s in which the more politically and socially successful of the war leaders are photographed in variants of the traditional Greek warrior’s costume, including the foustanella or pleated white kilt; they include the undisputed masterpiece of early Greek portraiture, Filipos Margaritis’ bravura depiction of General Christodopulos Hadjipetros. These are, of course, highly formalised versions of what the average klepht would have worn in the 1820s, to which they bear the same relationship as do the kilts and sporrans in Raeburn’s paintings to the plaids worn at Culloden; nevertheless, what such portraits testify to is the fact that these men, once powerful wartime leaders, were now equally influential members of the new order of things.

Inevitably, younger men, or men who perhaps had not fought at all, adopted the same style of self-representation, wearing the foustanella as a mark of national allegiance, or else because it had become, following the example of king Otto, the fashionable thing to be seen and photographed in; just as inevitably, the style did not necessarily flatter the more sedentary individuals. Finally, by the 1870s, what had been a visual signifier of courage and devotion to a national ideal was acquiring overtones of cliché, even of mockery.

Filippos Margaritis, Athenian Family Group, 1855-60

The future of Greece, it was becoming clear to all forward-looking men, lay with Western Europe, and the ruling class conformed within a single generation. We can see the process at work in a wonderfully evocative family group by Margaritis, which shows the grizzled paterfamilias in full evzone regalia, including decorations, and ranged behind him his three sons. They are not merely wearing western dress, but three distinct variants of it: on the left, a clean-shaven bohemian lounger in checked pants, three fingers thrust provocatively in his trouser pocket; in the middle, the full-bearded son in sober, buttoned-up black who is clearly destined for the role of hardworking family provider; and on the right, the highly unreliable-looking boulevardier, complete with waxed moustache and cane. Add to the mixture a formidable battle-axe of a wife and a clearly discontented daughter, and you have the cast of a peculiarly cynical play by Moliére.

Both prints are in the collection of the National Gallery, Athens.

TRAVELLER'S REST

2011-06-14T12:45:00.004+03:00

Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Paddy’ to his many friends as well as to the numerous readers for whom he became an admired and much-loved figure, died on June 10th at the age of 96. He had fallen gravely ill in Greece towards the middle of May; when the end became inevitable, he asked to be flown back to England, arriving with less than a day in hand.

Paddy was loved as much for himself as for his writing, not only in England and Greece, his adopted second country, but seemingly also everywhere in the world his books had penetrated. It is almost impossible to think of an equivalent public figure of whom it could be said that throughout a long life lived at high physical and intellectual intensity, he showed true malice towards none, encountering little if any in return.

This delightful sketch of himself in Cretan dress was penned at the top of a letter to my mother dated 17th November, 1944; as he explains, "I have been lost again in a forest of whiskers for about three weeks, and my old mountain chums are down in the plains now, looking incredibly wild and shaggy". Ελαφρύ το χώμα που τον σκέπασε.

THREE WOMEN

2011-04-25T12:41:00.004+03:00

Tentatively dated from around 1890, the three women in this cabinet portrait have been identified as Efrosini Venardos Chlentzos (1843-1935) and her daughters Kyrani and Maria, from the small village of Christoforianika on the island of Kythera. In 1869 Efrosini married Charalambos Chlentzos, an illiterate farmer and fisherman. Aged 18, he was eight years younger than her, something fairly unusual at the time; the birth of her first daughter, Kirani, shortly after the wedding may suggest an explanation. Charalambos was lost at sea sometime during the late 1870s, leaving Efrosini to bring up four children, two sons and two daughters, in extremely straightened circumstances; three of her children eventually emigrated to the United States, and it is to the descendants of Maria Chlentzos that we owe the survival of this photograph.

The portrait was taken in a professional studio, most likely in Piraeus or Athens, on the occasion of what must have been a very rare, perhaps even once-in-a-lifetime trip for a poor Kytherian family. Efrosini is in the unrelieved black of widow’s mourning which she will wear to the end of her own life, but it is her daughters’ dress which is at first sight puzzling: though both are in traditional costume, they are wearing not Kytherian outfits, but particularly elaborate versions of traditional Attic dress which it is certain they could never have afforded to own (see the print by Moraitis for comparison). The answer is that by the time this photograph was taken, it had become fashionable for middle and upper-class women to wear ‘traditional’ costume when being photographed; as the practice slowly percolated down the social ladder, studios took to keeping a number of outfits on the premises for clients to change into. Since it was obviously impossible to keep examples of the many regional costumes on hand, the Athenian studios at least were limited to the Amalia ensemble, the elegant variant of traditional dress devised under the Bavarian monarchy for the royal ladies-in-waiting, and the richly decorated formal Attic dress.

Though frozen in the immobility requested by the unknown photographer, each of the three women has a different expression. Efrosini’s mouth is set, and her face and hands show the effects of a hard life and unremitting labour; she clutches and twists a handkerchief (which perhaps the photographer has given her) in order to keep her hands occupied. Standing, Kyrani, the eldest child and the only one not to leave Kythera – as the eldest daughter, it would be her duty to stay at home – has her mother’s mouth; while it is not yet set in Efrosini’s bitter lines, she has an expression of resignation, though she was eventually to marry and see at least one her five children follow her brothers and sister to the States. Wide-eyed Maria, the youngest, is the only one of the three looking not at the camera, but past it and into the future.

With thanks to Terry Chlentzos and Vikki Fraioli

Petros Moraitis: Unknown woman in Attic dress (c.1880s)

CHANGE 20.03.11

2011-04-18T12:54:00.001+03:00

20 March 2011, 11.15 am

MERE COMPILATIONS OF FACTS...

2011-03-25T09:41:00.000+02:00

Patrick Cariou, from Yes, Rasta

A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered Richard Prince to destroy a series of artworks apparently worth several tens of millions of dollars. The work in question consisted of reproductions of photographs by the French photographer Patrick Cariou, lifted from his book Yes, Rasta and roughly and very minimally overpainted by Prince; according to the court, Prince and his gallery, Gagosian, were in clear breach of Cariou’s copyright. “He and the gallery”, reported the Guardian, “were found to have acted in bad faith by not asking permission to use Cariou's photographs or withdrawing them from sale when the photographer sent them notice”.

While I’m not usually a supporter of ongoing American attempts to increase and widen the scope of copyright in all directions, it’s impossible not to sympathise with Cariou in this case. Prince is a tedious artist who place is more in the discourse of art business than that of art. His value is effectively limited to providing a useful paradigm of the concept of appropriation (itself a concept of severely limited interest); once the point is made, which shouldn’t take more than a handful of seconds, the intellectual and artistic content of Price’s work has been exhausted.

The crassness of the defendants was reflected in the language of their legal representatives, who asserted that Cariou's photographs were "mere compilations of facts … arranged with minimum creativity … [and were] therefore not protectable" by copyright law. The defence, one which has been used with some success in the past, was based on the premise that the appropriated work, lacking all artistic merit of its own, had if anything been improved by Prince’s scribbles. As it happens, Cariou’s Rastafarian portraits (see above) are impressively skilled and powerful images, and it strikes me that the photographer could well have sued Prince, not so much for copyright infringement as for artistic vandalism.

ATHENS CONSIDERED AS THE SETTING FOR A COMPUTER GAME

2011-03-16T18:04:00.003+02:00

Stelios Efstathopoulos: Athens Within, 2011

The hottest subject for computer games these days is zombies. Blank-eyed, shuffling, homicidal, the living dead who pursue and are pursued by the player down the endless avenues, streets and alleys of anonymous city centres. City centres like the Omonia-Syntagma-Thiseion triangle, decaying heart of Athens and the subject of Stelios Efstathopoulos’ latest photographic sequence. Currently showing at the Hellenic American Union, Athens Within focuses on the area’s shifting population, but the real protagonist seems to be the disintegrating environment through which the former move or drift.

There is nothing remotely nostalgic about this dystopic view of Athens, dominated as it is by brutalist concrete architecture seen from the worst possible angle, namely from street level and close-up. Through narrow concrete and brick labyrinths, past the signs of a consumerist economy on its last legs, through drifts of rubbish, moves a population seemingly lost, drugged or at best, indifferent. There are few signs of either community or redemption: just two street people sharing a cigarette, a child absorbed in play, the stray dogs with their irrepressible jauntiness. Every available surface seems to have been defaced either by graffitied tags or the much vaster surfaces of graffiti “art”, though it is hard to tell which of these two forms of vandalism is the more aggressive and contemptuous of the social contract.

Greece has no very strong tradition of street photography in either the French (Cartier-Bresson) or the American (William Klein) style; the best examples we have tend either to the grotesque and sardonic, as do the street portraits of Periklis Alkidis, or to the surrealist quasi-abstraction of Nikos Panayotopoulos’ Common Imaginary Places. Efstathopoulos’ contribution, all the more welcome and surprising for going against the grain of most contemporary Greek photographic production, is an impressive addition to the genre. It is also, seen from the perspective of the current social and economic crisis in which Greece appear to inexorably mired, a saddening requiem to what was once a vibrant (if never particularly elegant) capital city centre, now reduced to the status of stage setting for a zombie hunt…

Athens Without can be seen at the Hellenic American Union, Massalias 22, to 5 April

Η ΑΘΗΝΑ ΕΙΔΩΜΕΝΗ ΩΣ ΣΚΗΝΙΚΟ ΨΗΦΙΑΚΟΥ ΠΑΙΧΝΙΔΙΟΥ

Το δημοφιλέστερο θέμα ψηφιακών παιχνιδιών σήμερα είναι τα ζόμπι: αιμοβόροι ζωντανοί νεκροί που σκουντουφλάνε στους ατελείωτους δρόμους ανώνυμων αστικών κέντρων, συγχρόνως κυνηγοί και θήραμα. Αστικά κέντρα σαν το τρίγωνο Ομόνοια-Σύνταγμα-Θησείο, σαθρή καρδιά της Αθήνας και θέμα της τελευταίας εργασίας του Στέλιου Ευσταθόπουλου. Η έκθεση Αθήνα εντός που παρουσιάζεται αυτές τις μέρες στην Ελληνοαμερικανική Ένωση εστιάζει στον εναλλασσόμενο πληθυσμό του τριγώνου, πραγματικός όμως πρωταγωνιστής μοιάζει να είναι το ίδιο το θρυμματισμένο περιβάλλον μέσα στο οποίο οι άνθρωποι κινούνται ή απλώς πλανώνται.

Η δυστοπική αυτή θεώρηση της Αθήνας δεν έχει φυσικά τίποτε το νοσταλγικό. Δεσπόζουσα οπτική είναι η σκληρή Μοντερνιστική αρχιτεκτονική, ιδωμένη από τη χειρότερη δυνατόν γωνία, από το επίπεδο δηλαδή του δρόμου και από κοντινή απόσταση. Μέσα σε στενούς τσιμεντένιους λαβυρίνθους, δίπλα στα σημάδια μιας εν διαλύσει καταναλωτικής κοινωνίας, πάνω από σωριασμένα σκουπίδια κινείται ένας πληθυσμός χαμένος, ναρκωμένος ή στην καλύτερη περίπτωση, αδιάφορος. Ελάχιστα βλέπουμε δείγματα κοινωνικότητας ή ελπίδας: μονάχα δύο άστεγοι που μοιράζονται τσιγάρο, ένα παιδί απορροφημένο στο παιχνίδι, τα αδέσποτα σκυλιά με την ασυγκράτητη ξενοιασιά τους. Κάθε επίπεδη επιφάνεια έχει μαγαριστεί είτε από μονογραφικά tags είτε από τα πολύ εκτενέστερα ‘καλλιτεχνικά’ δήθεν γκραφίτι - αν και δύσκολα θα μπορούσε κανείς να πει ποια από τις δύο αυτές μορφές βανδαλισμού εκφράζει μεγαλύτερη περιφρόνηση προς το κοινωνικό συμβόλαιο.

Η Ελλάδα δεν διαθέτει ισχυρή παράδοση φωτογραφίας δρόμου, είτε της Γαλλικής σχολής (Cartier-Bresson) είτε της Αμερικάνικης (William Klein)· τα καλύτερα παραδείγματα του είδους που έχουμε να επιδείξουμε τείνουν από τη μία στο γκροτέσκο και το σαρδόνιο, όπως τα πορτραίτα δρόμου του Περικλή Αλκίδη, και από την άλλη προς τον αφαιρετικό υπερρεαλισμό των Κοινών Φανταστικών Τόπων του Νίκου Παναγιωτόπουλου. Η πρόταση του Ευσταθόπουλου είναι ιδιαιτέρως ευπρόσδεκτη αλλά και αναπάντεχη, καθώς εναντιώνεται στις κυρίαρχες σήμερα φωτογραφικές τάσεις στην Ελλάδα. Παράλληλα, στο πλαίσιο της οικονομικής και κοινωνικής κρίσης στην οποία η χώρα βυθίζεται καθημερινά, αποτελεί θλιβερή ελεγεία για ένα άλλοτε σφύζων (αν όχι ιδιαιτέρως αρμονικό) αστικό κέντρο, που κατάντησε σκηνικό για άθλια ψηφιακά παιχνίδια...

Η έκθεση Αθήνα εντός θα είναι στην Ελληνοαμερικανική Ένωση, Μασσαλίας 22, μέχρι τις 5 Απριλίου.

CHANGE 19.02.11

2011-02-20T11:26:00.000+02:00

19 February 2011, 7.00 pm

GREEK (HIS)TORIES THROUGH THE LENS

2011-02-12T14:59:00.000+02:00

The conference on Greek photography and Greek history organised for June 2011 by the Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek studies at King's College, London, which I first mentioned in a post last April, has now been extended to last four days. According to the organisers, the conference "aims at exploring photographic depictions of Greece and Greeks from the 1840s to the present in an empirical, theoretical and comparative context. The themes of the conference will examine photographs as a historical source of information, as windows into the country’s past, as symbolic capital in collective narratives and propaganda wars and as testimonies that record the interests and concerns of photographers as of their animate subjects and their surroundings. This will be the first conference worldwide to capitalise on photographic depictions of Greece as a means to problematise its recent history and its iconic representation in international media. Emphasis will be laid on processes of circulating photographs and contexts of consuming them, on photographs as artefacts and on narrative discourses developed around visual materials, on photography as memory and counter-memory, and on the complex relation between photography and archaeology as a nation-building institution."

With a broad spectrum of speakers from Greece and abroad covering a number of different disciplines, this promises to be probably the most intensive and searching consideration of Greek photography to date. A full programme, including abstracts of all the papers to be presented, is available from the Centre for Hellenic Studies site. The conference organisers are Philip Carabott, Eleni Papargyriou and Charlotte Roueché.

CHANGE 11.12.10

2010-12-11T09:09:00.000+02:00

11 December 2010, 7.36 am

A GREEK ISLAND DOCTOR AT WORK, 1920s

2010-12-10T11:35:00.002+02:00

Doctor attending a patient, Kythera, 1920s

This is one of the most interesting and unusual images in the Kythera Photographic Archive. It shows a severely ill woman in bed, attended by a man, almost certainly a doctor, who is taking her pulse; he is holding an open watch in his left hand. What must be an ice pack lies on the patient’s head, suggesting an attempt to reduce a high fever; her forehead is protected by a napkin, while the pack is held in place by a string rising diagonally over the bed. The table holds two bottles, one of them probably containing medicine, an octagonal pill (?) box, an enameled drinking mug and a jug covered by a beaded cloth. The doctor's calf-length boots with their heavily studded soles are an indication of the state of the roads in twenties.

The print, which is in poor condition, has been cut down at some point in its history. The truncated text was inscribed in china ink directly on the glass negative plate. It reads “Panayot[is]… by the side of the p[atient ?]”, or maybe “Panayot[a]”, possibly the name of the patient. Whatever the circumstances, it was a very unusual choice of subject, and, given the slow speed of film at the time, was almost certainly set up for the camera. We know the woman did not survive, since another photograph from the same source shows her on her deathbed – formal photographs of the dead, unlike this one, were not uncommon in prewar Kythera.

Gelatin chloride print, 23x26 cm. Ref. no. KPA 00070.

WASHING CLOTHES IN THE KASTALIAN SPRING

2010-11-27T10:11:00.001+02:00

École Francaise d'Athénes: The Delphi Excavations, 1892-93

Human geography is innately conservative; once a location has been successfully occupied for a significant length of time, it is rarely abandoned, unless conditions change radically. Temples were often founded on the sites of primitive shrines until superseded in turn by Christian churches, while cyclopean walls, byzantine castles and crusader keeps might succeed one another upon the same commanding position. If such a site is eventually abandoned, the consecutive strata offer rich picking to archaeologists; conversely, continued occupation often poses serious practical problems, such as occur almost daily in Athens or Rome.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the site of ancient Delphi was almost entirely covered by the village of Kastri. The new Greek state, however, fully alive to the crucial role to be played in the development of national consciousness by identification with ancient Greece, showed particular interest in this historically and emotionally loaded site; the earliest tentative excavations, by the German architect Edmund Laurent, were carried out at the express order of the first head of state, John Capodistria.

Full-scale excavations were obviously out of the question until the village could be removed elsewhere; it took 68 years to complete the process of removal, beginning with a census in 1838. Among the problems to be dealt with were the excessive claims of the locals, at least according to government functionaries (“They will demand three, perhaps even four times the value of their property”, opined an inspector of finances), the already hydra-headed Greek bureaucracy, the earthquake of 1870 and a persistent plague of bandits. Confirming that nothing ever changes, a report dated 1841 informs us that some considerable time after all new construction had been forbidden, “repeated requests were submitted, demanding either that excavations be put in hand, or that construction permits be issued”.

It appeared for a moment that the earthquake might open the way to a final resolution of the problem. In a letter, the Secretary General of the Archaeological Society claimed that “the majority of inhabitants, consumed by fear of earthquakes and fearing a violent repetition, genuinely desire to remove from Delphi”. There were, of course, a few stubborn holdouts (“some few old men prefer to die in their ancestral huts”), but in general the secretary felt he could conclude “rejoicing that the Delphi earthquakes have been the occasion for this missive”.

Things were not that simple. Before the village could be moved the villagers had to be compensated, but no funds were available for the purpose. In 1879, the French Archaeological School of Athens expressed an interest in undertaking the excavation at French government expense, and a serious attempt at concluding a treaty between the two governments came close to fruition in 1881. There followed interminable negotiations between the French, the Greek government and the Kastriotes, which ended in 1891 when relevant legislation was finally passed. As usual, however, putting it into practice proved another matter entirely. In September, according to Théophile Homolle, the School’s director, “no sooner had work began, than the whole village gathered round, and the more hot-blooded among the inhabitants attacked the workmen and took the tools from their hands, shouting that because compensation had not been paid, they would prevent work from proceeding…”.

It is to the work of the Ecole Francaise, and particularly Homolle’s interest in photography, that we owe the photographs which commemorate the unusual (and very provisional) co-existence of an extensive archaeological excavation and an occupied settlement. The Kastriotes were eventually removed to a new site, abandoning Delphi to archaeologists – and tourists. I admit to a certain satisfaction upon finding that even forty years later, the descendants of the Kastriotes were making their presence felt: in a document dated 1930, Alexander Kondoleon, Overseer of Antiquities, complains that “the women of Delphi persist in washing their clothes in the Kastalian spring”. Amen.

Adapted from John Stathatos, Archaeologies, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, 2003. Quotations from Delphoi, Anazitontas to chameno iero [Delphi, Searching for the Lost Sanctuary], École Francaise d’Athènes & Directorate of Delphi Antiquities, Yiannikos-Kalthis, Athens 1992.

CHANGE 28.10.10

2010-11-24T09:52:00.000+02:00

28 October 2010, 8.25 am

GHOST FIELDS

2010-11-21T09:50:00.002+02:00

From Κώστας Μανωλίδης, "Μορφοποιήσεις του καλλιεργημένου εδάφους" (2010)

In a recent post on his blog, the architect Kostas Manolidis proposes the term “ghost fields” for the increasingly numerous abandoned cultivations of rural Greece. Over time, the distinguishing marks of these fields and paddocks sink back into the landscape, becoming less and less visible to observers at ground level. From the air, however, the traces of what were once sites of intensive agricultural activity at once snap into focus - a technique already used to good effect by classical and medieval archaeologists. Manolidis has posted a set of diagrammatic maps of abandoned field systems from several different regions, together with the aerial photographs the diagrams are based on.

CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE WITH RUINS

2010-11-18T13:59:00.004+02:00

“Landscape with Ruins” is a succinct enough description of early Greek landscape photography. The ruins have multiplied a thousand fold since the 1860s, but in their latest guise they rarely attract the attention of seekers after the picturesque. Like ancient shrines and temples, the ferroconcrete skeletons of half-finished and abandoned structures are often to be found in particularly attractive locations (beaches, hilltops and woodland clearings are all favourites); they spread like festering sores, and like pustules, they are symptomatic of a deeper sickness in the body politic.

In the more innocent post-war years, unfinished or half-finished structures were usually encountered in towns and villages. They were indicative of a modest prosperity, sufficient to permit the building of a family home in stages: this year the foundations and load-bearing columns, next year the brickwork, the rendering and window frames whenever there was a good olive harvest. Often, when the ground floor was complete, rebars would be left protruding from the roof slab, witnesses to the ambition to someday add another floor to the structure.

In recent decades, however, the elaborate concrete skeletons in their mostly rural or semi-rural settings are almost always indicative of corruption, greed or hubris. It is these contemporary ruins that Jeff Vanderpool has photographed like so many new temples to Nemesis. The luxurious country villa dropped in the middle of a protected forest, the proposed seaside restaurant an illegal stone’s throw from the beach, the pharaonic development funded through who knows what ‘arrangements’ by EU money: all have been stalled, half-completed, by poor management, financial irresponsibility or – too rarely – court order.

Some will eventually be completed, once more money is raised and the right people have been bribed; others will remain in situ, crumbling far too gradually, a cynical legacy to future generations. For whilst a building may on occasion be legally condemned and a court order issued for its demolition, never in living memory has a single such order actually been carried out. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

Jeff Vanderpool, Dreams: Ruins of a Forgotten Future. Manifactura Gallery, Athens; to 2 December

Οι πρώτες φωτογραφίσεις του Ελληνικού τοπίου θα μπορούσαν σχηματικά να χαρακτηρισθούν “τοπία μετά ερειπίων”. Τα ερείπια έκτοτε έχουν πολλαπλασιασθεί, η τωρινή τους όμως όψη σπανίως πια προσελκύει τους λάτρεις του γραφικού. Όπως άλλοτε οι αρχαίοι ναοί, οι τσιμεντένιοι σκελετοί μισοτελειωμένων και εγκαταλελειμμένων κτισμάτων συναντιόνται κατά προτίμηση σε τοποθεσίες ιδιάζουσας ομορφιάς, όπως παραλίες, κορυφές λόφων ή δάση. Πληθαίνουν και απλώνονται σαν επιδερμικά καρκινώματα, συμπτώματα βαθύτερου νοσήματος στο σώμα της κοινωνίας.

Στα ποιό αθώα μεταπολεμικά χρόνια, τέτοιες κατασκευές συναντούσε κανείς κυρίως σε πόλεις και χωριά. Ήσαν ένδειξη μιας καινούργιας, σχετικής πάντα ευημερίας, αρκετής πάντως για το σταδιακό χτίσιμο της οικογενειακής οικίας: την πρώτη χρονιά θεμέλια και κολόνες, την άλλη τα τούβλα, ενώ ο σοβάς και οι κάσες ίσως περίμεναν την καλή χρονιά στις ελιές. Συχνά άφηναν αναμονές στη στέγη του ισογείου, ένδειξη ότι κάποτε θα έπεφτε και άλλος όροφος.

Τις τελευταίες όμως δεκαετίες, οι τσιμεντένιοι αυτοί σκελετοί, ως επί το πλείστον σε εξοχικές ή περιαστικές τοποθεσίες, είναι σχεδόν πάντα απόρροια διαφθοράς, πλεονεξίας ή ματαιοδοξίας. Τους καινούργιους αυτούς ναούς της Νέμεσης επέλεξε να φωτογραφίσει ο Jeff Vanderpool. Η πολυτελής βίλλα στη μέση του προστατευόμενου δάσους, η παραθαλάσσια ταβέρνα πάνω στον αιγιαλό, το φαραωνικό σύμπλεγμα που χρηματοδοτήθηκε, άγνωστο πως, από Ευρωπαϊκά κονδύλια: όλα έχουν παγώσει από έλλειψη χρημάτων, από κακοδιαχείριση η (πολύ σπανιότερα) ως αποτέλεσμα εισαγγελικής απόφασης.

Κάποια από αυτά τελικά θα αποπερατωθούν, όταν βρεθούν καινούργιοι πόροι και δωροδοκηθούν τα κατάλληλα άτομα· άλλα πάλι θα παραμείνουν ως έχουν, φθαρμένα (δυστυχώς πολύ σιγά) από τον χρόνο, κυνική κληρονομιά στις ερχόμενες γενεές. Διότι εάν σε αραιά διαστήματα εκδίδεται καμιά διαταγή κατεδάφισης, το απολύτως βέβαιον είναι ότι ουδέποτε θα εκτελεσθεί. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: Αν αναζητάς μνημείο, κοίταξε γύρω σου!

Jeff Vanderpool, Ερείπια ενός ξεχασμένου μέλλοντος. Γκαλερί Manifactura, Αθήνα, μέχρι 2 Δεκεμβρίου

CHANGE 02.10.10

2010-10-04T14:57:00.001+03:00

2 October 2010, 8.27 am

UNACCOMPANIED MINORS / ΑΣΥΝΟΔΕΥΤΑ ΑΝΗΛΙΚΑ

2010-09-28T10:52:00.000+03:00

Giorgos Moutafis' photographs of young people who have attempted the often dangerous crossing of the Aegean from Turkey won the last year's Young Photographers Award at the Kythera Photographic Encounters. The complete sequence, "Unaccompanied Minors", will be shown at the Zeidoros Art Centre as part of this year's event.

“War, enforced conscription, physical and psychological violence, the death of their parents or simply disastrous economic conditions are only a few of the reasons why hundreds of children find themselves obliged to flee their countries. The journey to Europe is difficult, the crossing of the Aegean perilous. Some of the children make it. Others are lost. In the narrative, the term illegal immigrant always precedes the term child”. Giorgos Moutafis

Οι φωτογραφίες του Γιώργου Μουτάφη με θέμα τη συχνά επικίνδυνη διάσχιση του Αιγαίου από ανήλικους μετανάστες απέσπασε το Βραβείο Νέων Φωτογράφων κατά τη διάρκεια των περσινών Φωτογραφικών Συναντήσεων Κυθήρων. Ολόκληρη η σειρά παρουσιάζεται στο Πνευματικό Κέντρο Ζείδωρος στα πλαίσια των φετινών ΦΣΚ.

«Ο πόλεμος, η υποχρεωτική στράτευση, η σωματική και ψυχολογική βία, ο θάνατος των γονιών τους και οι οικονομικές συνθήκες είναι μόνο λίγοι από τους λόγους που εκατοντάδες παιδιά εγκαταλείπουν τις χώρες τους. Το ταξίδι προς την Ευρώπη είναι αρκετά δύσκολο, το πέρασμα από την θάλασσα του Αιγαίου επικίνδυνο, κάποια παιδία τα καταφέρνουν. Κάποια χάνονται. Ο όρος λαθρομετανάστης προηγείται πάντα της λέξης παιδί». Γιώργος Μουτάφης

URBAN STRUCTURES / ΑΣΤΙΚΕΣ ΔΟΜΕΣ

2010-09-14T11:59:00.001+03:00

Eleni Maligoura / Ελένη Μαλιγκούρα

John Stathatos / Γιάννης Σταθάτος

Panayotopoulos & Petsini / Παναγιωτόπουλος & Πετσίνη

This year’s Kythera Photographic Encounters will focus in part on contemporary urban landscape. Urban Structures, a group exhibition curated by Penelope Petsini, will include work by ten Greek photographers: Costis Antoniadis, Erieta Attali, Pericles Boutos, Kostas Kolokythas, Eleni Maligoura, Fotis Milionis, Eleni Mouzakiti, Nikos Panayotopoulos, Penelope Petsini and John Stathatos. The exhibition will take place in the old primary school of Mitata village on October 1st.

Related events include a showing of Gold Dust (“Chrysoskoni”), a new full-length feature film by Margarita Manda: “Gold dust was born of a need to speak about Athens, my home city. A city whose daily transformation eradicates its past, whose globalisation proceeds without respect for its inhabitants, without concern for either aesthetics or ethics”.

Fotis Milionis / Φώτης Μηλιώνης

Costis Antoniadis / Κωστής Αντωνιάδης

Οι φετινές Φωτογραφικές Συναντήσεις Κυθήρων εστιάζουν εν μέρει στο σύγχρονο αστικό τοπίο. Οι Αστικές Δομές, ομαδική έκθεση επιμελημένη από την Πηνελόπη Πετσίνη, θα συμπεριλάβουν έργα των Ελλήνων φωτογράφων Κωστή Αντωνιάδη, Εριέτα Αττάλη, Κώστα Κολοκυθά, Ελένη Μαλιγκούρα, Φώτη Μηλιώνη, Ελένη Μουζακίτη, Περικλή Μπούτο, Νίκο Παναγιωτόπουλο, Πηνελόπη Πετσίνη και Γιάννη Σταθάτο. Η έκθεση εγκαινιάζεται στο παλιό δημοτικό σχολείου των Μητάτων την 1 Οκτωβρίου.

Στην ίδια θεματική εντάσσεται η καινούργια ταινία της Μαργαρίτας Μαντά, Χρυσόσκονη, που θα παρουσιασθεί το ίδιο βράδυ στο “Λιοτρίβι του Φάβα” στα Μητάτα. Σύμφωνα με τον σκηνοθέτη, “Η Χρυσόσκονη γεννήθηκε από την ανάγκη να μιλήσω για την πόλη μου. Την Αθήνα. Μια πόλη που μεταλλάσσεται εξαφανίζοντας το βιωμένο της παρελθόν. Που παγκοσμιοποιείται χωρίς σεβασμό στο ανθρώπινο στοιχείο της, χωρίς αισθητική και ήθος”.

THE 2010 KYTHERA PHOTOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS

2010-09-14T10:04:00.000+03:00

The Kythera Photographic Encounters, now in their ninth year, take place at the end of every September. This event, which has become an important date in the Greek photographic calendar, brings together photographers, photographic historians, critics and curators for four days of exhibitions, lectures, discussions and socialising. The focus is largely on Greek photography, but efforts are being made to give the Encounters a more international flavour.The highlights of the Encounters are the annual two-day Conference on the History of Greek Photography, the only one of its kind in the country, and a regular group exhibition of new work by young Greek photographers. Two annual prizes are also awarded: the Municipality of Kythera Award for the best Greek photographic book of the past year, and the Encounters Award which goes to one of the portfolios submitted for the young photographer’s exhibition.

This year’s event takes place from the 29th of September to the 3rd of October. The Kythera Photographic Encounters are organised by the Kythera Cultural Association under the direction of John Stathatos. For further information, please consult www.photokythera.com, or contact the organisers at mail@photokythera.com.

CHANGE 29.08.10

2010-08-29T09:15:00.000+03:00

29 August 2010, 7.45 am

PREMONITIONS OF ART NOUVEAU

2010-08-25T14:34:00.001+03:00

The object pictured above is the so-called Jasper Cup, or Bowl, a highlight of the treasury of the Athonite Monastery of Vatopedi. What follow below are the opinions, expressed forty years apart, of two tolerably knowledgeable British aesthetes, Robert Byron and John Julius Norwich.

Byron first: “In the whole collection one object stands alone. This is the cup bestowed on the monastery by Manuel Cantacuzenos, son of the Emperor of that name, who was despot of Mistra from 1349 to 1380. Standing about 10 inches high, it consists of a broad bowl of transparent, gold-flecked jasper, yellow, dark green, and red, which is mounted on a thick octagonal stalk of silver-gilt. From a bulge in the centre of this, two rhythmic tapering dragons spring off at a tangent, until, taking an acute-angled turn, they come to rest upon the metal rim, wings folded, heads supported by little pair of clutching claws”. (The Station, 1928)

And then Norwich: “For the truth is that the treasures of Athos, though nearly always interesting and often beautiful, are rarely in themselves sublime. One or two, admittedly, catch at the breath; … several others fascinate for their associations, like the monumentally hideous jasper receptacle presented to Vatopedi by Manuel Cantacuzene, son of John VI, with its dire warning of what, five hundred years later, was to be described as art nouveau by a deluded posterity”. (Mount Athos, 1966)

Personally, I can see where Norwich is coming from. The proportions of the bowl and its base are worryingly out of balance with each other, and there is something about the whole thing which tends to set one’s teeth on edge. Maybe after a while it set the Despot’s teeth on edge, too, so that he ended up banishing it to the skevofilakion of Vatopedi.

DIGITAL DIRECTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHERS IN GREECE

2010-08-10T10:23:00.000+03:00

Earlier this summer the Hellenic Literary & Historical Archive, more familiarly known as ELIA from its Greek initials, released researcher Alkis Xanthakis’ Directory of Greek & Foreign Photographers in Greece, 1839-1960 in CD format. This extremely useful tool has entries for many if not most of the photographers known to have worked in Greece during the period specified, with the emphasis necessarily on native photographers; inevitably, the entries for some of the more obscure practitioners can be on the sparse side. Each entry includes (where known) basic information such as date of birth and death, nationality and place and period of principal activity; a brief biography; and one or more examples of the photographer’s work. The information is available in English and Spanish as well as Greek.

The photographers can be consulted alphabetically by surname, by date, by nationality and by location; the latter is particularly useful, given that many professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries tended to confine their activities to a single town or geographical area, often extremely restricted. Unfortunately, the Windows-only CD has no true search function, so that one has to wade through what are in effect very short menu pages to find something (96 of them, in the case of surnames beginning with ‘P’). In general, this otherwise highly commendable effort is rather let down by a very inflexible and old-fashioned digital execution; for example, whilst actually occupying a relatively small screen area, it refuses to run in windowed mode, thereby making it impossible to switch between it and other applications – a major limitation in what is a research tool rather an entertainment CD.

The entire database will eventually be available online. In the meantime, ELIA has very courteously announced that copies of the CD can be obtained free of charge by personal application either from the Archive or from the National Bank of Greece’s Cultural Institute, both in Athens. Researchers abroad should write to the Photography Archive at ELIA, Agiou Andreou 5, Athens 10556.

INTERACTIVE MOUSSAKA

2010-07-01T12:57:00.003+03:00

Η GALLERY VOULGAROKTONOU 32

σας προσκαλεί την Παρασκευή 2 Ιουλίου 2010 στο χώρο της, το βραδάκι, για μια δράση του Νίκου Παναγιωτόπουλου και της Πηνελόπης Πετσίνη.

Οι καλλιτέχνες θα προσπαθήσουν παρουσία κοινού να φτιάξουν μουσακά.

Διάρκεια δράσης από τις 18.00 έως τις 21.30, ίσως και λίγο ακόμη (θα εξαρτηθεί από το φούρνο).

P.S. Για τους εκτός Αθηνών, θα υπάρχει live stream στο διαδύκτιο.

Το έργο θα μοιραστεί μετά στους φτωχούς.

CHANGE 24.06.10

2010-06-24T10:06:00.000+03:00

16 June 2010, 6.15 pm

GENTLEMEN OF BACONGO

2010-06-15T10:59:00.005+03:00

Daniele Tamagni, from Gentlemen of Bacongo

An inevitable side-effect of our culture's constant visual overload is that photographs have lost their sense of wonder; the world grows smaller, and we think that perhaps we've seen it all before - except, of course, we haven't. One can still sometimes recover the excitement which comes from stumbling across photographs that show us something truly new, astonishing, delightful or amazing. For me, the discovery of Daniele Tamagni's wonderful photographs of Congolese dandies, published last year as Gentlemen of Bacongo by Trolley Books, was the cause of precisely such delighted astonishment.

According to Paul Smith's introduction, "The Sapeurs today belong to 'La SAPE' (Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes) - one of the world's most exclusive clubs. Members have their own code of honour, codes of professional conduct and strict notions of morality. It is a world within a world within a city. [...] Unlike some US hip-hop gangs who are dressed in similar fine threads, there is no bloodshed here - here your clothes do all the fighting for you, otherwise you are not fit to be called a Sapeur."  

What comes across vividly is the sheer exuberance of these dedicated performance artists - performing above all for one another, that most unforgiving of audiences, but also and however fleetingly, in Tamagni's images, for us.

Daniele Tamagni, Gentlemen of Bacongo, Trolley Books, London 2009. ISBN 978-1-904563-83-9

LIMINAL LANDSCAPES

2010-06-11T13:29:00.004+03:00

Pavlos Fysakis, Cabo Espichel, 2007

Pavlos Fysakis, Vatsiana, Gavdos, 2006

Boundaries and margins, fringes and borders exert a strange attraction. The southernmost tip of the British Isles is called Land’s End, as is Cape Finistere in Spain (from the Latin finisterrae), once thought of as Europe’s westernmost edge. Lands End is also the title Pavlos Fysakis has given to his latest project, a journey to the four corners of Europe: to Gavdos, south of Crete, the continent’s southernmost island; to Cabo da Roca in Portugal, now officially the westernmost point by 16 kms; to Nordkapp (“North Cape”) in Norway; and to Vorkuta in the Urals, Europe’s easternmost city. Fysakis notes that one function of borders is to define the safely known world, and he wonders how one might conceivably define a European identity.

There can be no answer, of course, but the question proved the inspiration for a striking and thoughtful body of work. The four locations are illustrated through a seamless combination of landscape and portraiture. Though the images have evidently been organised with care, even precision (the level horizons, the careful centering of subjects), their formal quality allows Fysakis considerable expressive latitude. With the exception of two almost abstract seascapes, he anchors his landscapes by placing some humble object in the near or middle distance: an animal skull, a fence, a television aerial, a pedestrian bridge, a wind gauge. Beyond them extend minimalist scenes of water, sand, dry sedges, snow or tarmac. Through Fysakis’ eyes, the fringes propose liminal landscapes stripped of all inessentials. “Aqui... οnde a terra termina e o mar começa” (“Here… where the earth ends and the sea begins”) wrote Camoes about Cabo da Roca, and the same could be said of Gavdos and Nordkapp, while Vorkuta, still haunted by the ghosts of Stalin’s victims, turns its face to the ocean of the tundra.

The melancholy of the margins.

Pavlos Fysakis, Lands End, Babel, Athens 2009. ISBN 978 960 931681 1.

Παύλος Φυσάκης, Praia das Maças, 2007

Τα άκρα, οι παρυφές, οι εσχατιές ασκούν μια μυστηριώδη γοητεία. Το νοτιότερο σημείο της Αγγλίας λέγεται Land’s End, «Γης Τέλος», όπως και το ακρωτήρι Φινιστέρε στην Ισπανία (από το λατινικό finisterrae), που για χρόνια εθεωρείτο το δυτικότερο σημείο της Ευρώπης. Lands End είναι και ο τίτλος που έδωσε ο Παύλος Φυσάκης στην τελευταία του εργασία, ένα οδοιπορικό στα τέσσερα άκρα της Ευρώπης: στη Γαύδο, το νοτιότερο νησί της ηπείρου, στο ακρωτήρι Cabo da Roca της Πορτογαλίας που τελικά (με 16 χιλιόμετρα διαφορά) απέσπασε τον τίτλο του δυτικότερου σημείου από το Φινιστέρε, στο Nordkapp («Βόρειο Ακρωτήρι») της Νορβηγίας, και στη Βορκούτα των Ουραλίων, ανατολικότερη πόλη της Ευρώπης. Ο Φυσάκης παρατηρεί πως «η λειτουργία των συνόρων είναι να οριοθετεί το ασφαλή κόσμο», και αναρωτιέται πώς άραγε ορίζεται η ευρωπαϊκή ταυτότητα.

Η ερώτηση βέβαια παραμένει αναπάντητη, αποτελεί όμως το έναυσμα για μια εξαιρετικά ζυγισμένη και ώριμη εργασία. Οι τέσσερις τοποθεσίες που επέλεξε ο φωτογράφος σκιαγραφούνται με τοπία και πορτραίτα που συνεργάζονται αδιάρρηκτα μεταξύ τους. Αν και οι φωτογραφίες είναι εμφανώς στημένες με μεγάλη προσοχή, θα έλεγα μάλιστα με τυπικότητα (η ευθύτητα του ορίζοντα, το κεντράρισμα των προσώπων), ο φορμαλισμός αυτός επιτρέπει στον Φυσάκη μεγάλη εκφραστική ελευθερία. Με εξαίρεση δύο σχεδόν αφαιρετικές θαλασσογραφίες, προσγειώνει τα τοπία του τοποθετώντας κάποιο αντικείμενο στο πρώτο πλάνο ή το πολύ στη μέση απόσταση: κρανίο ζώου, φράχτη, αντένα τηλεόρασης, πεζογέφυρα, ανεμομετρητή. Πέρα από τα ταπεινά αυτά αντικείμενα απλώνονται μινιμαλιστικές σκηνές: θάλασσα, άμμος, ξερά χόρτα, άσφαλτος, χιόνι. Μέσα από τη ματιά του Φυσάκη, οι παρυφές προτάσσουν τοπία απογυμνωμένα από κάθε τι περιττό. Για τρεις από τις τέσσερις ισχύει αυτό που έγραψε ο Camoes για το Cabo da Roca: “Aqui... οnde a terra termina e o mar começa” («Εδώ… όπου τελειώνει η γη και η θάλασσα αρχίζει»)· η τέταρτη, η Βορκούτα, στοιχειωμένη ακόμα από τα θύματα του Στάλιν, στρέφεται προς τον ωκεανό της τούνδρας.

Η μελαγχολία των άκρων.

Παύλος Φυσάκης, Lands End, Babel, Αθήνα 2009. ISBN 978 960 931681 1.

“I WANT WHAT IS GOOD FOR GREECE AND NOTHING ELSE…”

2010-06-07T15:52:00.005+03:00

To the General Government of Greece
Unfavourable rumours of new dissensions in the Greek Government, or rather of the start of a civil war, have reached here. I hope with all my heart that they are false or at least exaggerated, since I could not imagine any calamity that is more to be feared for you than this. I must admit to you frankly that if some kind of order and union is not confirmed, all hopes for a loan will be lost, - any assistance that Greece might expect from abroad, which certainly would not be inconsiderable nor contemptible, will be suspended, and maybe even stopped, and what is worse is that the great Powers of Europe, of which none was an enemy of Greece, and which seemed favourably inclined to agree with the establishment of an independent Greek state, will be persuaded that the Greeks are not capable of governing themselves and will arrange some means for putting an end to your disorder which will cut short all your most noble hopes, and all those of your friends.

Lord Byron, 30 November 1823

Original in Italian. From Byron’s Letters & Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand, London 1981, vol.11, p.69.

Προς τη Γενική Διοίκηση της Ελλάδας
Δυσοίωνες διαδόσεις μιλάνε για καινούργιες έριδες στο εσωτερικό της Ελληνικής Κυβέρνησης, ακόμα και για απαρχές εμφυλίου πολέμου. Εύχομαι με όλη μου την καρδιά να πρόκειται για ψέματα ή τουλάχιστον για υπερβολές, γιατί στην αντίθετη περίπτωση δύσκολα θα μπορούσα να φαντασθώ μεγαλύτερη και πιο επίφοβη καταστροφή. Σας ομολογώ ευθέως πως αν δεν επέλθουν πρόδηλα κάποια τάξη και κάποια ενότητα, θα εξανεμισθεί κάθε ελπίδα δανεισμού· η οποιασδήποτε μορφής βοήθεια στην οποία ελπίζει η Ελλάδα, βοήθεια κάθε άλλο παρά αμελητέα ή ευκαταφρόνητη, θα ανασταλεί, ίσως ακόμα και να ακυρωθεί. Ακόμα χειρότερα, οι μεγάλες Δυνάμεις της Ευρώπης, καμία εκ των οποίων δεν εχθρευόταν την Ελλάδα, παρά απεναντίας έδειχναν να αντιμετωπίζουν θετικά την εδραίωση ανεξάρτητου Ελληνικού κράτους, θα πεισθούν ότι οι Έλληνες είναι ανίκανοι να κυβερνήσουν εαυτούς και θα επιλέξουν κάποιον άλλον τρόπο να δώσουν τέλος στη αταξία σας, θάβοντας οριστικά τις λαμπρές ελπίδες που τρέφαμε τόσο εσείς όσο και οι φίλοι σας.

Λόρδος Βύρων, 30 Νοεμβρίου 1823

Το πρωτότυπο της επιστολής είναι γραμμένο στα Ιταλικά. Δύο αντίγραφα βρίσκονται στην Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη.

CHANGE 06.06.10

2010-06-06T15:55:00.000+03:00

6 June 2010, 2.35 pm

ON THE SLIPPERY NATURE OF EVIDENCE

2010-06-01T21:02:00.003+03:00

Frames from an enhanced-light video distributed by the Israeli Defense Forces

The problem with still or moving imagery produced in evidence is that it can sometimes show more than had been intended. The frames above are from a two minute, forty second video produced and distributed by the Israeli Defense Forces in order to justify yesterday's attack on the vessels of the Free Gaza flotilla. The first minute or so is particularly dramatic, and has been marked up to underscore the violent nature of the response to armed Israeli commandos dropping on the Mavi Marmara in the middle of the night: the passengers certainly appear to be beating at least one of the intruders with sticks of some kind (the video calls them "metal rods"), and another unfortunate is pushed over the side, to land on the deck below. However, within seconds the passengers are seen to be beating a hasty retreat away from the commandos (on the right in the images), who are brandishing what are clearly handguns; since there were at least ten deaths amongst the defenders, we may take it for granted that the guns were sooner or later used to fire live ammunition.

In a televised statement yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the deaths in these words: "They deliberately attacked the first soldiers who came on the ship. They were mobbed, they were clubbed, they were beaten, stabbed, there was even a report of gunfire, and our soldiers had to defend themselves or they would have been killed. And regrettably, in this exchange at least ten people died". A justification eerily reminiscent of the old courtroom joke, "The defendant proceeded to attack the police officer's boot with his face".

A MODEL OF THE UNIVERSAL NATURE

2010-05-30T20:40:00.001+03:00

John Stathatos, Parc André Citroën, Paris

Next, a spacious, wonderful garden, wherein whatsoever plant the sun of divers climate, or the earth out of divers moulds, either wild or by the culture of man brought forth, may be … set and cherished: this garden to be built about with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds; with two lakes adjoining, the one of fresh water and the other of salt, for like variety of fishes. And so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private.

Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum (1594)

A WARTIME CHRISTMAS EVE, 1942

2010-05-28T22:39:00.004+03:00

Manolis Fatseas, Livadi, 1942 (contemporary print from glass negative)

Photographed by a young Manolis Fatseas, the six men in this photograph formed part of the German occupying forces on the Greek island of Kythera during the World War II. They have gathered in a requisitioned house in the village of Livadi, most likely the one serving as their unit headquarters, and it is Christmas eve - 24 December, 1942. The large sign they are holding up, composed of several sheets of typing paper glued together, reads “A Wartime Christmas Eve in the Mediterranean”.

Kythera was very much a military backwater, but it overlooked the strategically important sea passage between the Greek mainland and Crete. The men belong not to a Wermacht (army) unit, but to a Luftwaffe (air force) field unit, and they are there to keep tabs on Allied sea and air movements. Much later in the war, the Germans were to ship a mysterious listening device to Kythera, quite possibly a primitive form of radar, but before it could be installed the retreat from Greece was ordered, and it was evacuated, still under wraps, along with the last occupiers. That this posting was not regarded as particularly arduous is underlined by the middle-aged appearance and distinctly unmilitary bearing of the group; all six are enlisted men, including the single NCO.

The decorations include what must have been one of the smallest available official photographs of Field Marshal Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. On a shelf to the left stands a makeshift Christmas tree consisting of an Aleppo pine bough covered in tinsel and placed in a clay water-jug, alongside a small vase of flowers. Continuing the festive theme, the calendar on the wall at the right proclaims that “Who loves not wine woman and song, remains a wet blanket all life long”. Interestingly, the man in the middle is flourishing, not bottles of Asti Spumante or the equivalent, as one might have supposed, but real champagne from Epernay – in this case, Champagne Eugène Cliquot, a reputable but long-since vanished brand. Since these cannot by any stretch of the imagination have been available locally, they must represent booty from the fall of France, quite possibly acquired by the Luftwaffe unit itself during an earlier posting.

The men seemed determined to make the best of things. They certainly have every reason to be thankful; within the last month, the Soviet army has completed the encirclement of General Paulus in Stalingrad, and Rommel has been defeated yet again in the North African desert. For German soldiers on Christmas Eve, 1942, there were very much worse places to be in than Kythera.

INHABITING A LANDSCAPE

2010-05-23T17:33:00.002+03:00

To even begin understanding a landscape, you must also consider its natural history – specifically, the plants, animals and above all the people who live upon and from it. Divorced from any sense of the natural and human forces which went into its making, a landscape photo is nothing more than a sometimes pretty picture postcard. Teresa Kaufman, an American photographer, has lived in the French Alps since 1976, and knows the valleys and high pastures around Chamonix as only a year-round resident and walker could. In 2007 a regional publisher, La Fontaine de Siloé, published an astonishing collection of black and white photographs by Kaufman under the title Thérèse et ses deux fréres (Thérèse and her Two Brothers). The photos, backed by a minimal text, illustrate the life of what must be one of the very last families of full-time subsistence farmers in the European Alps.

Thérèse Thissot and her two elderly bachelor brothers live in the Faucigny region, wintering on the sunny slopes of La Côte-d’Arbroz and summering in the high pastures of the valley of Combafou. In 1446, sixteen families acquired the rights to settle in Combafou from the Carthusian monks of Bellevaux. Towards the end of the 19th century, ten families still made the annual trek with their cattle, including cows, goats, pigs, rabbits and chickens. These days, the Thissot family are the last to maintain an alpage chalet at Foron; the rest are slowly decaying. When, in time, Thérèse and her brothers pass on, or give up a way of life which they love for something perhaps easier, the landscape will change once again; at this moment, it is still marked and defined by the presence over the centuries of farmers like the Thissots and their beasts, by their paths and settlements, their pasturage and clearances. Above all, in a very tangible way, by their presence in the landscape.

Teresa Kaufman’s photographs, evidence of an intimacy which somehow, delicately, avoids thrusting itself on either its subjects or their viewer, remind me in their obvious honesty of Jean Mohr’s in A Fortunate Man, his collaboration with John Berger. Berger opened that book with the following lines: “Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal”.

Teresa Kaufman, Thérèse et ses deux fréres, La Fontaine de Siloé, Montmélian 2007. ISBN 978 2 84206 349 8.

CHANGE 14.05.10

2010-05-14T14:29:00.000+03:00

14 May 2010, 12.59 am

CHANGE 13.05.10

2010-05-14T12:09:00.000+03:00

23 May 2010, 6.28 pm

THE EATING OF THE GODS

2010-05-02T11:05:00.003+03:00

John Stathatos, Untitled, 2010

"Pentheus is made the scapegoat. The scapegoat is a surrogate who must be made to resemble the One whom he has replaced; in an ancient ritual a ram led to sacrifice had his horns gilded and a wreath hung around his neck. The scapegoat is the image of the One to whom he is sacrificed. The ritual is a repetition of divine sacrifice. Pentheus is torn to pieces because the Other had also been torn to pieces."

Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods (1970)

Theophagy, a mixed media group exhibition at the Cultural Centre of the Municipality of Athens, 3-11 May.

"Ο Πενθεύς γίνεται άθελά του αποδιοπομπαίος τράγος. Ο αποδιοπομπαίος τράγος είναι το υποκατάστατο που αναγκάζεται να πάρει τη μορφή Εκείνου που αντικαθιστά· σύμφωνα με πανάρχαια ιεροτελεστία, ο τράγος που οδηγείται στη θυσία έχει επιχρυσωμένα κέρατα και φοράει στεφάνι. Ο αποδιοπομπαίος τράγος είναι η εικόνα Εκείνου στον οποίον θυσιάζεται. Η ιεροτελεστία είναι επανάληψη της θείας θυσίας. Ο Πενθεύς κομματιάζεται γιατί και το Άλλο είχε κάποτε διαμελισθεί."

Jan Kott, Το φάγωμα των θεών (1970)

Θεοφαγία, μικτή έκθεση στο Πνευματικό Κέντρο του Δήμου Αθηναίων, 3-11 Μαΐου.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

2010-04-29T16:30:00.002+03:00

Found photograph

If photographs are meditations on memory, then they are also, inescapably, meditations on death. This is partly because the ability to travel in imagination from present to past cannot be divorced from that, more ambiguous, of projecting into the future; we remember, with greater or lesser accuracy, what has been, but the one thing we know about the future we know with absolute authority, and that is our own passing. The other reason, of course, is that photographs are subject to a kind of temporal red-shift. Far from standing still, they recede from us at the speed of light; faces, objects, landscapes, all vanish over the event horizon almost as soon as the emulsion dries. It has been said that photographs are a way of seizing and preserving time, of saving something from the Heraclitean flux, but that is a delusion; nothing is as surely torn from our fingers by the rushing waters as the photographs of our dead. This, I think, explains the elegiac nature of so much photography and of almost all old photographs; they are attempts at freezing the passage of time which, inevitably, failed.

_________________________________________

Στον βαθμό που κάθε φωτογραφία είναι κατά βάθος ένας στοχασμός πάνω στις διεργασίες της μνήμης, αποτελεί αναπόφευκτα και στοχασμό πάνω στον θάνατο. Και αυτό γιατί η ικανότητά μας να ταξιδεύουμε με τη φαντασία στο παρελθόν συνυπάρχει με την αντίστροφη διαδρομή, την ατένιση δηλαδή του μέλλοντος· ενώ μπορούμε να ανασύρουμε στη μνήμη λεπτομέρειες του παρελθόντος, το μοναδικό μελλοντικό γεγονός για το οποίο μπορούμε να είμαστε απολύτως βέβαιοι είναι η μοιραία έκβαση της ζωής μας. Ο άλλος λόγος είναι το ότι οι φωτογραφίες υπόκεινται σε ένα είδος ερυθρής μετατόπισης (red shift) στον χρόνο. Όχι μόνο δεν στέκονται ακίνητες, παρά αντιθέτως απομακρύνονται από μας με την ταχύτητα του φωτός: πρόσωπα, αντικείμενα, τοπία, όλα εξαφανίζονται πίσω από τον ορίζοντα γεγονότων προτού καλά-καλά στεγνώσει η εμουλσιόν. Κάποιοι πιστεύουν πως με τις φωτογραφίες μπορεί κανείς να συλλάβει και να ακινητοποιήσει τον χρόνο, να σώσει δηλαδή κάτι από τον Ηρακλείτειο ρου - πρόκειται όμως περί αυταπάτης. Τίποτα δεν χάνεται μέσα από τα δάκτυλά μας τόσο γρήγορα όσο οι φωτογραφίες των νεκρών μας. Αυτό, πιστεύω, εξηγεί την ελεγειακή φύση των παλαιών φωτογραφιών: πρόκειται για προσπάθειες να ανασταλεί το πέρασμα του χρόνου, προσπάθειες εκ των ενόντων καταδικασμένες και άκαρπες.

CHANGE 23.04.10

2010-04-24T09:15:00.000+03:00

23 April 2010, 7.30 pm

THE SHROUDED GODS

2010-04-22T11:24:00.005+03:00

Lizzie Calligas, Metoikesis, 2010

“The statues are in the museum.
Goodnight”.

George Seferis, Thrush

The figures in Lizzie Calligas’ photographs are severe, almost hieratic. The once perhaps familiar statues from the old Acropolis museum, wrapped now from head to foot in white linen cloth and on the verge of moving to their new home, seem suddenly and strangely remote. Shrouding has changed not just the statues’ appearance, but their very nature. The anthropomorphic depiction of ancient Greek gods went well beyond a generalised human aspect; significantly, sculptors did not aim at an expressionless or inscrutable appearance, like that of the Egyptian divinities, but gave their statues realistic expressions which are still recognisable today. Naturally, the gods were of their very nature represented as infinitely more impressive, flawless and remote than mortals, yet they remain graven in our image and after our likeness. In contrast to most peoples of the ancient world, when Athenians turned to representations of their gods, they would be confronted with something at least partly familiar. The expressions worn by the gods might suggest condescension or effortless superiority, but they were easily comprehensible.

In Calligas’ arresting images, the statues have acquired a new and almost disquieting gravity. Whereas one might expect the enveloping fabric to diminish their authority, banishing any hint of individuality and reducing them to abject bundles, the effect proves to be exactly the opposite: unrecognisable, the muffled shapes rear up imposingly, virtually demanding our respect. They might be priests, seers or even warriors, were it not obvious that these are deities.

The concept of veiled or covered deities can be found in many different cultures. The Aiseras or Dii Involuti of the Etruscans, the Shrouded Gods, governed the destinies of gods and men alike, much like, according to Bulfinch’s Mythology, “the inscrutable Necessity [Ananke] that filled the dark background of the old Greek religion”. Nor is the notion alien to the monotheistic religions. In a well-known passage, Martin Luther wrote, “Until now we have dealt only with the veiled God, for in this life we cannot deal with God face to face”, whilst according to a Sufi belief, the word “Allah” derives from “al-lâhu”, meaning that which is hidden or veiled. Shrouding, of course, serves two purposes: on the one hand it hides the deity from the unworthy eyes of sinful worshippers, but on the other, it can also blind. Triglav, the three-headed god of the ancient Slavs, was veiled in order to avoid seeing the sins of humanity.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the issues which this latest work raises in the context of the debate around positive and negative sculptural space. If an ancient statue, for example, occupies positive space, and a cast such as Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Monument in Vienna’s Judenplatz occupies negative space, where should we place Calligas’ shrouded gods? The statue’s positive space is now bounded and defined by the enveloping fabric, resulting effectively in an imprint or cast of the original. And in any case, what exactly are we dealing with here? Photographic images? Sculpture? Photographic images of sculpture? Photographic images which, having acquired a monumental quality, are laying claim to the status of sculpture? Such a claim is less unlikely today than it would have been even a decade ago; after all, Gilbert and George have been calling their large photographic compositions “two-dimensional sculpture” for some time now.

The statues were once in the museum, and are now again in the museum; whether the change is for the better, only time will tell. The Shrouded Gods, suspended in temporary limbo by Lizzie Calligas, maintain the cryptic silence proper to their nature.

From an essay in Lizzie Calligas: Metoikesis, Cube Art Editions, Athens 2010

Λίζη Καλλιγά, Μετοίκησις, 2010

- «Τ’ αγάλματα είναι στο μουσείο.
Καληνύχτα».

Γιώργος Σεφέρης, Κίχλη

Οι μορφές που βλέπουμε στις φωτογραφίες της Λίζης Καλλιγά είναι αυστηρές, ιερατικές. Τα άλλοτε γνώριμα αγάλματα, τυλιγμένα εξ ολοκλήρου στο λευκό ύφασμα και έτοιμα για μετοίκιση από τον βράχο της Ακροπόλεως στην καινούργια τους κατοικία, φαντάζουν ξαφνικά απόμακρα και ξένα. Σαβανωμένα, τα αγάλματα αλλάζουν όχι μόνον όψη, αλλά και φύση. Χαρακτηριστικό της απεικόνισης των θεών της αρχαίας Ελλάδας ήταν η ουσιαστική ανθρωποποίηση των, ενσάρκωση που δεν εξαντλείτο σε μια γενικευμένη ανθρώπινη μορφή· είναι ουσιώδες το ότι οι γλύπτες δεν παρουσίαζαν τα έργα τους ανέκφραστα ή αποστασιοποιημένα, όπως τα αγάλματα των Αιγυπτίων, παρά τους έδιναν εκφράσεις ζωντανές, που μπορούμε ακόμα και σήμερα να διαβάσουμε και να κατανοήσουμε. Φυσικά, οι παραστάσεις των θεών τους ήθελαν εκ των ενόντων απείρως επιβλητικότερους, ομορφότερους και πιό απόκοσμους από τους θνητούς, δεν έπαυαν όμως να είναι φτιαγμένοι κατ’ εικόνα και ομοίωσή μας. Σε αντίθεση με τους περισσότερους αρχαίους λαούς, όταν οι Αθηναίοι κοίταζαν τα ομοιώματα των θεών τους, αντίκριζαν κάτι που ήταν, εν μέρει τουλάχιστον, οικείο. Μπορεί οι εκφράσεις των θεών να επέπνεαν ανωτερότητα ή να προκαλούσαν το δέος, τουλάχιστον όμως ήσαν άμεσα αναγνώσιμες και κατανοητές.

Στην αναπάντεχη εκδοχή που παρουσιάζει η Καλλιγά, τα αγάλματα έχουν αποκτήσει μια εντελώς καινούργια, σχεδόν ανησυχητική βαρύτητα. Ενώ θα περίμενε κανείς ότι το ύφασμα που τα κουκουλώνει θα τα αποδυνάμωνε, αφαιρώντας κάθε ίχνος ατομικότητας και μετατρέποντάς τα σε ταπεινούς, ανώνυμους μπόγους, συμβαίνει τελικά το αντίθετο: οι σαβανωμένες μορφές, αγνώριστες, ορθώνονται επιβλητικά, αξιώνοντας απαιτητικά σχεδόν τον σεβασμό μας. Θα μπορούσαν να είναι ιέρειες, μάντισσες, ακόμα και πολεμιστές, αν δεν ήταν τελικά προφανές ότι πρόκειται για θεότητες.

Η έννοια του συγκεκαλυμμένου θεού συναντάται σε πολλούς πολιτισμούς. Οι Aiseras ή Dii Involuti των Ετρούσκων, οι Σαβανωμένοι Θεοί, κυβερνούσαν θνητούς και θεούς κατά τον ίδιο τρόπο που, σύμφωνα με τη Μυθολογία του Bulfinch, «η αινιγματική Ανάγκη κρύβεται πίσω από τους πρωταγωνιστές της αρχαίας Ελληνικής θρησκείας». Αλλά και στις μονοθεϊστικές θρησκείες εμφανίζεται η ίδια έννοια. Σε γνωστό του κείμενο, ο Λούθηρος γράφει, «Μέχρις σήμερα, αντικρίζαμε μονάχα τον καλυμμένο Θεό, γιατί σε τούτη τη ζωή δεν μπορούμε να αντικρίσουμε τον Θεό πρόσωπο με πρόσωπο», ενώ κατά μια δοξασία των Σούφι, η λέξη «Αλλάχ» προέρχεται από το al-Lâha, δηλαδή το κρυμμένο, το συγκεκαλυμμένο. Το σαβάνωμα, βέβαια, έχει διπλό αντικείμενο: αφενός κρύβει τη θεότητα από τα μάτια των πιστών, που λόγω των αμαρτιών τους δεν είναι άξιοι να την αντικρίσουν ακάλυπτη, αφετέρου όμως τυφλώνει. Ο Triglav, ο τρικέφαλος θεός των αρχαίων Σλάβων, ήταν σκεπασμένος με πέπλο για να μην βλέπει τα ανομήματα των ανθρώπων.

Αξίζει τέλος να μνημονευθούν ορισμένα ερωτήματα που εγείρουν τα έργα αυτά στο πλαίσιο της συζήτησης γύρω από τις έννοιες του «θετικού» και «αρνητικού» χώρου στη γλυπτική. Εάν ένα αρχαίο άγαλμα, λόγου χάριν, καταλαμβάνει θετικό χώρο, και ένα εκμαγείο σαν αυτά της Rachel Whiteread, όπως το Μνημείο του Ολοκαυτώματος στη Βιέννη, καταλαμβάνει αρνητικό χώρο, πού ακριβώς θα πρέπει να τοποθετήσουμε τις σαβανωμένες θεότητες της Καλλιγά; Ο θετικός χώρος του αγάλματος ορίζεται πλέον από το περιβάλλον ύφασμα, με αποτέλεσμα να βλέπουμε ουσιαστικά την αποτύπωση ή το εκμαγείο του πρωτοτύπου. Και εν πάση περιπτώσει, με τι έχουμε να κάνουμε εδώ; Πρόκειται για απλές φωτογραφίες; Για γλυπτά; Για φωτογραφίες γλυπτών; Για φωτογραφίες που, έχοντας αποκτήσει μνημειακό χαρακτήρα, διεκδικούν κάτι από την καλλιτεχνική υπόσταση της γλυπτικής; Να θυμηθούμε ότι οι Gilbert & George από καιρό χαρακτηρίζουν τις μεγάλες φωτογραφικές συνθέσεις τους «δισδιάστατη γλυπτική».

Τα αγάλματα ήσαν στο μουσείο, τα αγάλματα βρίσκονται και πάλι στο μουσείο· το κατά πόσον η αλλαγή αυτή είναι για το καλύτερο, ο καιρός θα δείξει. Οι σαβανωμένες θεότητες, στο μεταίχμιο όπου τις τοποθετεί η Λίζη Καλλιγά, τηρούν τη σιωπή που αρμόζει στο λειτούργημά τους.

Απόσπασμα δοκιμίου στον τόμο Λίζη Καλλιγά: Μετοίκησις, Εκδόσεις Τέχνης Κύβος, Αθήνα 2010

BEFORE PHOTOSHOP

2010-04-19T12:13:00.004+03:00

Unknown photographer, Composite portrait, Athens, c.1912

A three-part composite souvenir portrait of a young woman in a flying machine soaring over the Acropolis of Athens. It consists of a rather crude pen-and-ink drawing of an monoplane, a much older photograph of the Acropolis (or, more likely, its lithographic reproduction), and a contemporary photograph of the woman from the waist up, including her hands and a car steering wheel. This collage, quite sophisticated for its time, would have been the work of a photographic studio rather than a fairground photographer. The woman portrayed is Aikaterini Leftheri from Kythera (b.1889); around 1912 she was in Athens, working for the family of a retired admiral. The photograph must have been taken during one of her afternoons off, and she is depicted in her best walking-out clothes, including an elegant bonnet. Her expression seems slightly apprehensive and she is gripping the steering-wheel hard, as though imagining herself diving through the clouds.

Σύνθετο αναμνηστικό πορτραίτο μιας νέας γυναίκας που πετάει ο ψηλά πάνω από την Ακρόπολη. Αποτελείται από ένα κάπως απλοϊκό αεροπλάνο ζωγραφισμένο με μελάνι, από προγενέστερη φωτογραφία της Ακρόπολης (ή μάλλον, από τη λιθογραφική αναπαραγωγή της), και από σύγχρονη φωτογραφία της γυναίκας από τη μέση και πάνω βαστώντας τιμόνι αυτοκινήτου. Το κολάζ αυτό, αρκετά επιτηδευμένο για την εποχή του, θα πρέπει να ήταν έργο κάποιου φωτογραφικού εργαστηρίου και όχι πλανόδιου. Η γυναίκα ήταν η Αικατερίνη Λευθέρη το γένος Λουράντου, από τα Κύθηρα (γ.1889). Το 1912 εργαζόταν στο σπίτι κάποιου ναυάρχου στην Αθήνα· μάλλον φωτογραφήθηκε κατά τη διάρκεια απογευματινής εξόδου, αφού φοράει τα καλά της, συμπεριλαμβανομένου του κομψού καπέλου. Η έκφρασή της φαίνεται λίγο φοβισμένη, και τα χέρια της σφίγγουν γερά το τιμόνι, σαν να φαντάζεται τον εαυτό της να βουτάει μέσα από τα σύννεφα.

LOMBROSO REDIVIVUS?

2010-04-12T15:02:00.004+03:00

The Italian psychiatrist and professor of “criminal anthropology” Cesare Lombroso believed a person’s face could reveal evidence of a predisposition to criminal behaviour. Enlisting photography in support of his theories, he assembled an extensive collection of photographic portraits of criminals in Italian and German prisons, hoping to deduce from them those characteristics which would identify social deviants through appearance alone. In his book L’homme criminel (Paris, 1887), he concluded that “we can now ascertain – with ease, simply by holding up a photograph – that among criminal men the predominant features are a massively developed jaw, sparse beard, hard eyes, thick hair and, secondarily, sticking-out ears, receding brow, a squint, and a misshapen nose”. His later descent into the wilder fields of racist eugenics and Social Darwinism helped discredit his views, but though there was clearly no scientific basis to Lombroso’s speculations, photography inevitably became an important tool of criminology, detection and, in the wrong hands, repression.

The idea that a person’s photograph can tell you anything much about their morality is of course suspect. Nevertheless… The mug shots above, which I first came across on (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, are of members of a Christian fundamentalist terrorist group called Hutarees. Based in the state of Michigan, they were arrested in March 2010 for, according to the New York Times, “plotting to kill law enforcement officers in hopes of inciting an antigovernment uprising”. The Hutaree website speculates, amongst other interesting concepts, that the Antichrist appeared on January 1st, 2007, and that his name is Javier Solana, then NATO Secretary General and later Secretary-General of the European Union.

Looking at these portraits, what comes almost automatically to mind is the Lombrosian term “moral imbecile”. And yet context is, as always, paramount. How civilised would any of us look in a US law-enforcement mug shot? Indeed, simply examine the photograph in your driving license, passport or identity card and ask yourself how it could look on a wanted poster. To balance the possibly unfair police mug shots, however, consider a photograph of the same group chosen by themselves and posted prominently on their website, file name “happy pics”:

Ο Ιταλός ψυχίατρος και καθηγητής εγκληματολογίας Cesare Lombroso πίστευε πως η προδιάθεση για εγκληματική δραστηριότητα ζωγραφίζεται στο πρόσωπό του ανθρώπου. Επιστρατεύοντας τη φωτογραφία για να στηρίξει τη θεωρία του, δημιούργησε συλλογή από χιλιάδες φωτογραφικά πορτραίτα φυλακισμένων στη Γερμανία και την Ιταλία, ελπίζοντας να ανακαλύψει ποια ακριβώς χαρακτηριστικά σφραγίζουν το πρόσωπο εν δυνάμει αντικοινωνικών ατόμων. Στο βιβλίο του Ο εγκληματίας άνδρας (Παρίσι, 1887), συμπέρανε πως “μπορούμε πια πολύ εύκολα, κοιτάζοντας απλώς μια φωτογραφία, να βεβαιωθούμε ότι στη τάξη των εγκληματιών επικρατούν τα υπερτροφικά σαγόνια, τα αραιά γένια, τα σκληρά μάτια και τα πυκνά μαλλιά…”. Η μετέπειτα ενασχόληση του με τον ρατσισμό, το ευγονισμό και τον κοινωνικό δαρβινισμό βοήθησαν στο να πέσουν σε ανυποληψία οι θεωρίες του, η φωτογραφία όμως εδραιώθηκε ως βασικό εργαλείο της αστυνομικής έρευνας, της εγκληματολογίας και, σε λάθος χέρια, της καταπίεσης.

Η ιδέα πως μια φωτογραφία έχει κάτι να πει σχετικά με τις ηθικές αρχές του εικονιζόμενου είναι βεβαίως κάθε άλλο παρά επιστημονική. Εντούτοις… Τα φωτογραφικά πορτραίτα στην αρχή του λήμματος αυτού απεικονίζουν τα μέλη μιας τρομοκρατικής ομάδας Χριστιανών φονταμενταλιστών που αυτοαποκαλούνται Χάτερι. Βασισμένοι στην πολιτεία του Michigan, σύμφωνα με τους New York Times συνελήφθησαν τον περασμένο Μάρτιο επειδή σχεδιάζαν να δολοφονήσουν αστυνομικούς, με σκοπό να προξενήσουν γενικευμένη εξέγερση. Στην ιστοσελίδα των Χάτερι συναντάμε, μεταξύ άλλων πρωτότυπων ιδεών, την πληροφορία ότι ο Αντίχρηστος δεν είναι άλλος από τον τότε Γενικό Γραμματέα του ΝΑΤΟ, Χαβιέρ Σολάνα.

Μελετώντας τις φωτογραφίες αυτές, δύσκολα θα αποφύγουμε να θυμηθούμε τον Λομπροσιανό χαρακτηρισμό “ηθικά ηλίθιοι”. Και όμως, τα συμφραζόμενα μιας φωτογραφίας είναι πάντοτε ύψιστης σημασίας. Πόσο πολιτισμένοι θα φαινόμασταν, οι περισσότεροι από μας, αν η φωτογραφία της ταυτότητάς μας δέσποζε πάνω από τη λεζάντα “καταζητείται”; Για να αντισταθμίσω λοιπόν σε κάποιο βαθμό τα - άδικα ίσως - αστυνομικά πορτραίτα των πρωταγωνιστών μας, διάλεξα την δεύτερη, ομαδική φωτογραφία, την οποία οι ίδιοι ανάρτησαν στην ιστοσελίδα τους. Ο τίτλος του ψηφιακού αρχείου της εν λόγω φωτογραφίας είναι “χαρούμενες εικόνες”.

ROAD TRIP: USA

2010-04-07T12:14:00.004+03:00

Yiorgis Yerolymbos, Monument Valley (2010)

Reflections on the strangeness and remoteness of the American natural and urban landscape, emphasising the other-worldly nature of its light.

Στοχασμοί πάνω στην αινιγματική αποστασιοποίηση του Αμερικανικού φυσικού και αστικού τοπίου, με έμφαση στο απόκοσμο φως που το χαρακτηρίζει.

Yiorgis Yerolymbos, Road Trip: USA at a.antonopoulou.art, Athens, to 29 April.

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY UNDER THE COLONELS

2010-04-03T14:15:00.002+03:00

Box camera, Athens (1978)

A home-made street photographer's box camera displayed in an Athens antique shop. It was usual for the photographer to include samples of his work behind a sheet of glass on the side of the box as a form of advertisement. This is an particularly good selection, characteristic of the three categories of imagery the photographer would most often have been called upon to provide: individual portraits, often printed small for official use on identity cards and the like; group souvenir portraits in front of prominent landmarks like the Academy; and formal street events such as parades or religious processions. These were mostly taken during the late sixties and early seventies - in other words, during the colonels' dictatorship, which explains the heavy preponderance of patriotic and religious ceremonial. The large portrait in the middle, second from the top, is of General Phaidon Gyzikis, nominal head of state from November 1973 to December 1974. Below the general is a photograph of King Constantine parading in full uniform - something he would never again have the opportunity of doing after his doomed counter-coup of December 1967, thus providing a useful terminus a quo for the collection.

Η παροπλισμένη μηχανή κάποιου πλανόδιου φωτογράφου, εκτεθειμένη σε Αθηναϊκό παλαιοπωλείο το 1978. Τα αναρτημένα δείγματα καλύπτουν τις τρεις δημοφιλέστερες κατηγορίες φωτογραφιών που προσέφεραν οι πλανόδιοι: ατομικά πορτραίτα, συχνά τυπωμένα μικρά για επίσημη χρήση σε ταυτότητες, ομαδικά αναμνηστικά ποτραίτα μπροστά σε γνωστά μνημεία όπως η Ακαδημία, και σκηνές δρόμου. Οι φωτογραφίες αυτές προφανώς χρονολογούνται από την εποχή της χούντας, όπως φαίνεται και από τον μεγάλο αριθμό στρατιωτικών παρελάσεων, θρησκευτικών τελετών και άλλων πατριωτικών εκδηλώσεων. Το μεσαίο πορτραίτο, δεύτερο από πάνω, απεικονίζει τον στρατηγό Φαίδωνα Γκιζίκη, τύποις αρχηγό κράτους από τον Νοέμβριο 1973 μέχρι τον Δεκέμβριο 1974. Ακριβώς από κάτω παρελαύνει ο Βασιλεύς Κωνσταντίνος – δραστηριότητα που δεν θα ήταν δυνατόν να επαναληφθεί μετά το αποτυχημένο αντικίνημα του Δεκεμβρίου 1967.

KORAES CHAIR BOUNCES BACK

2010-04-02T17:35:00.000+03:00

King’s College, London, is probably the single most important academic forum for Modern Greek studies outside Greece, housing as it does the Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies (an obvious yet uncommon pairing), the Centre for Hellenic Studies and the Koraes Chair in Modern Greek and Byzantine History, which dates back to 1918. Nevertheless, reflecting the dramatic power transfer in British universities from academics to administrators, the department was recently a candidate for dismemberment (along with the UK’s only, and much admired, chair in palaeography). As Iain Pears points out in a recent letter to the London Review of Books, “such administrators identify themselves as the masters of the institution, not its servants, and come to regard academics who were once colleagues as employees to be managed” (Vol.23 no.6, 25/3/2010).

The proposal generated considerable opposition, including a petition started by professors Mark Lauxtermann of Oxford and Konstantinos Dimadis of Freie Universität Berlin, which pointed out that “the ideal of Hellenism in its broadest sense, for which King’s stands, is reflected in its Centre for Hellenic Studies and in the Koraes chair”; it eventually garnered a total of 9,192 online signatures.

It is pleasant to record that for once, the angels appear to have scored a victory. On 25 March, Greek independence day, it was announced that the department had been reprieved through incorporation into the Centre – a Solomonic sort of judgement, but not, all things being equal, a bad idea at all. According to a press release from the college, “King’s College London has operated a Centre for Hellenic Studies since 1989. As a research centre it has until now co-ordinated the activities of several departments, but has not had its own dedicated staff or registered students. Under the new arrangements, the Centre for Hellenic Studies will incorporate the Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies, including its staff. Students will be registered in the Centre and it will be able to run its own teaching programmes”.

An important part of the Centre’s future programme is a three-day conference planned for June of next year, entitled “Greek (Hi)stories through the Lens: Photographs, Photographers & their Testimonies” and focusing on photographic depiction of Greeks and Greece from the 1840s to the present “in an empirical, and where appropriate, theoretical and comparative context”. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first time ever Greek photography is to be the object of such intense and concentrated scrutiny.

As an interesting footnote to this issue, I was amused to discover that the Koraes chair had been the object of a bitter row in the twenties when the chair’s first holder, Arnold Toynbee, was forced to resign after publishing a book highly sympathetic to the newly emergent Turkish nationalism in which he argued, presciently and of course correctly, that Greece’s Anatolian adventure was doomed. As Richard Clogg, who wrote his own book about the affair (Politics and the Academy, 1986 – now out of print and very expensive), concluded in a more accessible article, “in bid to avoid controversy, King’s College and London University, against the intentions of the chair’s founders, have since only appointed those interested in the calmer waters of Byzantium or literature rather than the treacherous shoals of Greek modern history and politics” (Times Higher Education, 6/6/1997). Amen.

TRAVEL IN THE PREWAR YEARS

2010-03-31T12:09:00.001+03:00

Travellers, Agia Pelagia, 1930s

It is difficult for anyone today to fully appreciate the isolation of most Greek island communities in the first half of the twentieth century. A relatively poor island like Kythera (Cerigo) might have regular if infrequent steamer communication with the port of Piraeus and the capital, but only a small percentage of the population would have the means, the opportunity or even much reason to take advantage of it. Except for once or twice in a lifetime journeys prompted by military service, emigration or severe medical emergency, travel on the packet steamer would normally be restricted to the island’s economic elite, commercial travellers and civil servants.

This anonymous photograph, dating from the early thirties, shows a representative enough group preparing to embark from the beach at Agia Pelagia, on the north of the island. The seven men are all wearing their city outfits, including suits, hats, ties or bow ties and town shoes. The man in the middle is holding what appears to be a small wooden box with a strap handle; it could be a container for something fragile, like a medical implement or medical samples, and he might be a doctor. The only woman among the group of travellers appears to be wearing peasant dress, but it seems nevertheless to be of better quality than the superficially similar outfit of the servant girl on the far left, who has a farouche expression and is holding some traveller’s gear, including an umbrella. Their luggage includes leather suitcases and the ubiquitous baskets and hampers which, closed by a piece of white muslin stitched into place, still served to carry everything from produce to clothing well into the seventies.

Behind them can be seen the rowboats which, in the absence of a proper harbour or mole, will carry the passengers and their luggage to the steamer when it arrives. The boatmen are elaborately indifferent to the photographer, but most of the gentlemen appear pleased with themselves.

________________________________________________

Δύσκολα μπορεί κανείς σήμερα να κατανοήσει την απομόνωση που χαρακτήριζε τις περισσότερες νησιωτικές κοινωνίες κατά το πρώτο μισό του εικοστού αιώνα. Ένα σχετικά πτωχό νησί σαν τα Κύθηρα μπορεί μεν να είχε τακτική, αν όχι απαραιτήτως συχνή, επικοινωνία με τον Πειραιά, αλλά ένα μικρό μόνο ποσοστό του πληθυσμού θα είχε τα μέσα, την ευκαιρία αλλά και τους λόγους να επωφεληθεί. Με εξαίρεση μοναδικές περιστάσεις όπως στρατιωτική θητεία, μετανάστευση ή σοβαρά προβλήματα υγείας, το ατμόπλοιο της γραμμής χρησιμοποιούσαν κατά κύριο λόγο οι οικονομικά προνομιούχοι, οι έμποροι και οι δημόσιοι υπάλληλοι.

Η ανώνυμη αυτή φωτογραφία των αρχών της δεκαετίας 1930 απεικονίζει μια χαρακτηριστική ομάδα ταξιδιωτών που περιμένουν να επιβιβασθούν από την ακτή της Αγίας Πελαγίας, στα βόρεια του νησιού. Οι άνδρες έχουν όλοι βάλει τα καλά τους, δηλαδή κοστούμι, καπέλο, γραβάτα ή παπιγιόν και λουστρίνια. Ο άνδρας στη μέση βαστάει ένα μικρό ξύλινο κουτί· ίσως πρόκειται για ιατρό, και το κουτί θα μπορούσε να περιέχει κάποιο εύθραυστο ιατρικό εργαλείο ή φαρμακευτικά δείγματα. Η μοναδική γυναίκα μεταξύ των επιβατών είναι ντυμένη σαν αγρότισσα, η ενδυμασία της όμως μοιάζει σαφώς καλύτερης ποιότητας από τη αντίστοιχη της κοπέλας στα αριστερά. Η δεύτερη αυτή πιθανώς να είναι υπηρέτρια· βαστάει τα υπάρχοντα κάποιου επιβάτη, ενώ η έκφρασή της, αντίθετα με τις εκφράσεις των ποιό εξοικειωμένων με τη φωτογραφία επιβατών, δείχνει αλαφιασμένη. Οι αποσκευές αποτελούνται από δερμάτινες βαλίτσες αλλά και τα πάσης χρήσεως πανέρια, που συνέχισαν να χρησιμοποιούνται μέχρι τη δεκαετία 1970 τουλάχιστον.

Πίσω τους διακρίνονται οι βάρκες με τις οποίες, ελλείψει λιμανιού ή λιμενοβραχίονος, θα προσεγγίσουν το ατμόπλοιο. Οι βαρκάρηδες δείχνουν αδιάφοροι στον φωτογράφο, οι κύριοι όμως μοιάζουν αρκούντως ικανοποιημένοι με τον εαυτό τους.

AN ELDRITCH LANDSCAPE

2010-03-27T14:57:00.000+02:00

Paul Seawright: From Hidden, 2003

There is another and subtler sense in which these images reference the hidden. With the exception of Nuristan, the landscape of Afghanistan, as I remember it and as Seawright’s landscapes confirm, tends inexorably to the minimal. The lowland deserts are mostly of the stony dasht variety, flat gravel plains stretching endlessly to the horizon, interrupted by occasional dry river beds or low outcrops of rock. The Hindu Kush range which covers the northern part of the country consists of largely barren slopes, often tortuously broken and ridged, between which sometimes nestle threads of piercingly blue water or patches of green vegetation clutched by the rock. The colours are generally muted, greys and light browns, mineral purples and ochres; even the rare greens seem faded. Above all, whether in the mountains or the desert, very little seems to obtrude on the landscape, which is made up of foreground and background, but only rarely of middle ground; when something does appear in the middle distance (a rider, a tree, a ruined tower or wrecked vehicle), it does so with unexpected presence. Such open, unvarnished statements of fact ought to suggest candour and guilelessness, but in fact they have precisely the opposite effect: surely, one feels, there is something hidden here after all - beyond that ridge, under that slope, at the far edge of the horizon. The paradox of Afghan landscape, successfully captured by Seawright, is that it always seems to be concealing something.

"Hiding in the Open" in Paul Seawright, Hidden. Imperial War Museum, London 2003. ISBN 9 781901 623758.

NATIONAL ALLEGORIES

2010-03-23T15:06:00.002+02:00

Sometime during the seventies, the younger members of the Greek community of Brisbane, Australia, celebrated a national holiday with a staged pageant incorporating a generous cross-section of Hellenic themes and symbols - an occasion fortunately captured for history (and the social pages of the local press) by an anonymous feature photographer from the Brisbane Telegraph. By far the heaviest emphasis, judging by the number of participants, is given to a freely imagined version of ancient Greece, though a smaller, more modestly dressed and staged contingent in the rear embody the revolution of 1821 and its robuster virtues. Their putative ancestors, in fact, seem closer to a Cinecittà version of Roman decadence than to the dour Spartan ideal, judging by the surprising amount of leg some of the young ladies are flashing. Among the symbolic items held aloft or displayed by their more modest sisters are a generic Grecian urn, a lyre, a basket of fruit and what looks like, but surely cannot be, a basket-ball.

Κατά τη διάρκεια μάλλον της δεκαετίας 1970, οι νέοι και νέες της Ελληνικής παροικίας του Brisbane της Αυστραλίας γιόρτασαν κάποια εθνική εορτή με την εικονιζόμενη πανηγυρική παράσταση, την οποία ευτυχώς για την ιστορία απαθανάτισε άγνωστός μας φωτογράφος της τοπικής εφημερίδας. Κρίνοντας από τον αριθμό των συμμετεχόντων, η μεγαλύτερη έμφαση δόθηκε στους αρχαίους υμών προγόνους, αν και μια μικρότερη, ποιό σεμνή από κάθε άποψη ομάδα αντιπροσώπευσε το στιβαρότερo εικοσιένα. Γεγονός είναι ότι οι φερόμενοι ως πρόγονοι των τελευταίων θυμίζουν περισσότερο την εκδοχή Τσινετσιτά της Ρωμαϊκής παρακμής και λιγότερο τις αυστηρές αρετές των Σπαρτιατών, αν κρίνουμε τουλάχιστον από τo πόσο μηρό επιδεικνύουν στο δίχως άλλο εμβρόντητο παροικιακό κοινό ορισμένες δεσποινίδες. Μεταξύ των συμβόλων που προτάσσουν παρατηρούμε αρχαιοπρεπή δοχεία, μια λύρα, καρπούς και κάτι που μοιάζει εκπληκτικά με μπάλα του μπάσκετ.

Kythera Photographic Archive, no. KPA00011 / Κυθηραϊκό Φωτογραφικό Αρχείο, αρ. KPA00011

DROIT DE REGARDS

2010-03-22T10:22:00.002+02:00

Cela te revient comme un droit de regard, tu es pour l’instant quelqu’un que le dispositif photographique met en demeure de proposer, sur ces images, un grand nombre de récits possibles. Tu n’es pas, d’abord, un sujet qui écrit, qui regarde ou qui lit, tu es celle qui me raconte, toute la nuit et tout le jour : ce qu’elle croit voir en regardant, mais en regardant seulement et toujours de la photographie. Et, à la différence de ce qui se passe avec toute autre "image", l’histoire ici ne précède pas le récit.

Jacques Derrida, lecture de Droit de regards, 1985

Permission to look comes to you as of right, you are for the moment someone empowered by the photographic apparatus to suggest a great number of possible narratives based on these images. You are not, to begin with, a subject who writes, observes or reads, you are the one who tells me stories all day and all night: who narrates what she thinks she sees through looking, but through looking only and always at photographs. And, contrary to what occurs with every other kind of “image”, here narrative is not preceded by history.

Jacques Derrida, a reading of Droit de regards, 1985

Έχεις το δικαίωμα να κοιτάζεις, να παρατηρείς, είσαι για την ώρα το άτομο στο οποίο το φωτογραφικό σύστημα δίνει την δυνατότητα να προτείνει, με βάση τις εικόνες αυτές, έναν μεγάλο αριθμό πιθανών αφηγήσεων. Δεν είσαι, καταρχήν, αυτή που γράφει, που παρατηρεί ή που διαβάζει, είσαι εκείνη που μου αφηγείται μέρα-νύχτα: που αφηγείται αυτό που νομίζει ότι βλέπει κοιτάζοντας, κοιτάζοντας όμως μονάχα και πάντοτε τη φωτογραφία. Αντίθετα δε με ότι συμβαίνει με κάθε άλλη «εικόνα», εδώ η ιστορία δεν προηγείται της αφήγησης.

Jacques Derrida, ανάγνωση του Droit de regards, 1985

CHANGE 20.03.10

2010-03-20T19:48:00.002+02:00

20 March 2010, 6.03 pm

WORK IN PROGRESS

2010-03-19T10:53:00.015+02:00

Martina Lindqvist, A Thousand Little Suns

Stefania Mizara, Gaza War Days

Yiorgis Yerolymbos, Road Trip: USA

wip, which stands for 'work in progress', is a digital photographic magazine produced by photographer and designer Simos Saltiel out of Salonika. In a field all too often characterised by fussy and over-elaborate design, wip would stand out for its refreshingly simple yet elegant appearance alone, but it also consistently manages to come up with intriguing new imagery from a wide variety of sources, whether in the form of single images or, as has been the tendency with recent issues, a more extensive sampling from ongoing sequences.

wip7, the latest to appear, includes eerie landscapes by Martina Lindqvist, excerpts from Yiorgis Yerolymbos' personal journey across the USA and Stefania Mizara's Gaza journal, as well as notable work by Natasha Gutermane, Abraham Pavilidis and Vanessa Winship. With "Smacznego!- Bon Appétit", Georgios Makkas reprises Anne Testut's wonderful 1995 "Europe à table" series of European families enjoying meals of widely differing qualities and conditions, but this time restricted to Poland (and including recipes). As was the case with the earlier work, "Smacznego" succeeds perfectly in exploiting photography's indiscriminate capacity for scavenging formally irrelevant yet deeply fascinating detail: in the example below, the eye bounces from the book-shaped landscape painting with its built-in clock (can there really be a total of four time-pieces in this one room?), touches briefly on the sixties wallpaper and Tomasz's magisterial dundreary whiskers before coming to rest, bemused, on a pair of bunny-rabbit slippers peeking coyly from under the table.

We live in this flat since 1974. The neighbours are OK and it is a calm and quiet place with good access to facilities... You can see the school from our balcony. We have a MacDonald's restaurant near us and the cinema is not that far away.

CRYING WOLF

2010-03-17T09:51:00.003+02:00

Spanish photographer José Luis Rodriguez has been stripped of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year title by London's Museum of Natural History after the judges decided that his prize-winning photograph depicted a tame wolf called Ossian rather than a wild animal on its way to supper in a farmer's paddock. According to Chris Gomersall, a wildlife photographer involved in judging who was quoted by the Guardian, "In wildlife photography there are ethical guidelines and there has always been an explicit understanding that if you take pictures of a captive subject, you declare it on your caption". Rodriguez denies the allegations, but apparently other Spanish photographers have recognised the wolf, while animal behaviourists have suggested that a wild animal would be far more likely to squeeze between the bars of the gate than indulge in balletic leaps.

In retrospect, the photograph really does look too perfect, too dramatic, as though Gregory Crewdson and a cast of dozens had spent a week setting it up. Maybe the image's original title, "Storybook Wolf", should have set alarm bells ringing. But is this really a problem? It is, after all, an extremely striking image. And as art critic Jonathan Jones asked in his blog, "Is José Luis Rodriguez's use of a tame animal for his award-winning wildlife shot really so criminal? At least he didn't use Photoshop".

The answer, as ever in issues of photographic authenticity, is that it depends almost entirely on context. In the very specific context of wildlife photography, the image is a lie, because it breaches the explicit understanding between photographer and viewer that images will involve the minimum possible artifice; while it is understood that the photographic depiction of a wild animal by a human is even more vulnerable to distortion of all kinds than most forms of representation, deliberate fraud cannot be countenanced here any more than it is, or should be, in reportage. On the other hand, had Rodriguez exhibited his image in a gallery, he would almost certainly be gathering plaudits and critical acclaim. Time for a paradigm shift, or just a career move?

TRYING HARDER

2010-03-16T09:56:00.008+02:00

Georgios Katsagelos: Havana, 29.09.2008

Georgios Katsagelos: Istanbul, 25.04.2008

Nightime in Havana. Despite the late hour, harsh neon lighting highlights a decaying refreshment stall on the corner of a once handsome town square. According to a sign on the wall, it remains open for business twenty-four hours a day (24 horas!), offering a very meagre selection of cigarettes, beer, rum and mint liqueur. Leaning on the worn counter, an exhausted-looking woman cat-naps with half-closed eyes, waiting for some benighted customer.

Istanbul. Standing in front of a crumbling, graffiti-covered wall, a young girl with an attractive, slightly Asiatic face casts a neutral, even rather cool look at the camera. Some unknown hand has made a small, heart-breakingly ineffective attempt at covering the wall in a fresh coat of white paint, but the effort seems to have been abandoned almost immediately, and the roller leans against the wall, echoing the girl’s stance.

From the monograph by Georgios Katsagelos, Trying Harder, University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 2009. ISBN 978 960 12 1842 7.

__________________________________________________

Νύχτα στην Αβάνα. Παρά την προχωρημένη ώρα, στη γωνία μιας άλλοτε μεγαλοπρεπούς πλατείας ένα φθαρμένο από τον χρόνο κυλικείο προβάλλει κάτω από σκληρό φθοριούχο φως. Σύμφωνα με την αναρτημένη πινακίδα, λειτουργεί όλο το εικοσιτετράωρο (24 horas!), προσφέροντας μια περιορισμένη επιλογή από τσιγάρα, ρούμι, μπίρα και λικέρ μέντας. Ακουμπισμένη στο φθαρμένο γκισέ, μια γυναίκα με την εξάντληση αποτυπωμένη στη στάση της μοιάζει να λαγοκοιμάται με μισόκλειστα μάτια, περιμένοντας κανέναν ξενυχτισμένο περαστικό.

Κωνσταντινούπολη. Όρθιο μπροστά από ένα τοίχο με βρόμικο, σκασμένο σοβά, γεμάτος εγχάρακτα γκραφίτι, ένα νεαρό κορίτσι με όμορφο, ελαφρώς ασιατικό παρουσιαστικό ρίχνει στον φακό μια ουδέτερη έως και λίγο ψυχρή ματιά. Κάποιο άγνωστο χέρι έχει κάνει μια μικρή, σπαρακτικά αναποτελεσματική προσπάθεια να καλύψει τον τοίχο με φρέσκο στρώμα λευκής μπογιάς, το ρολό όμως του μπογιατζή στέκεται εγκαταλελειμμένο, σε αντίστιξη με το κορίτσι.

Από το λεύκωμα του Γιώργου Κατσάγγελου, Προσπαθώντας περισσότερο, University Studio Press, Θεσσαλονίκη 2009. ISBN 978 960 12 1842 7.

A WELL-MEANING AND CURIOUS TOURIST

2010-03-14T13:12:00.002+02:00

Antoine Bon, photographer and historian, was a researcher at the Ecole Francaise d’Athènes (the French School of Archaeology in Athens) in the interwar years. Among historians, he is best known for the two-volume study of the Frankish period in the Peloponnesus, Le Morée franque, illustrated with his own photographs, which has been described as “a towering edifice of scholarship”.

Through two influential books, En Grèce (1932) and Retour en Gréce (1938), he was one of the first foreign travel photographers to go beyond ancient ruins in his depiction of Greek landscape. Much less known are some 217 photographs of Brasil, published like his earlier books by Paul Hartmann (Paris) in 1950 under the title Brésil: deux cent dix-sept photographies de A. Bon, M. Gautherot et P. Verger. A partial list of Bon’s publications can be found in the useful but somewhat chaotic online resource, Open Library.

The two Greek albums went through several reprints, including facsimiles of the original editions published in 1948 by that pillar of Greek cultural life, the Librairie Kauffmann. Both include a stately if at times overheated text by Fernand Chapoutier, another stalwart of the Ecole Francaise: “The reader may perhaps expect to find only ruins in this book. The version of Greece offered up to him is both sparser and richer, unobscured by any fiction. She has not decked herself to receive strangers. To depict her, we have had no recourse to artifice: no astonishing points of view, no artful play of lens. We ambled along, like well-meaning and curious tourists; a beautiful image would present itself; to fix it, a pocket Kodak sufficed. We never went in search of rare spectacle, nor did the peasant woman pose before the lens in her finery. Greece would wake, go about her business and fall asleep again, thinking herself alone; the reader will discover her as though she had been caught by surprise”.

Ο φωτογράφος και ιστορικός Antoine Bon ήταν συνεργάτης της Γαλλικής Αρχαιολογικής Σχολής Αθηνών την περίοδο του μεσοπολέμου. Στον χώρο της ιστορίας είναι γνωστός κυρίως για την δίτομη μελέτη της Φραγκοκρατίας στην Πελοπόννησο, Le Morée franque, εικονογραφημένη με δικές του φωτογραφίες, που χαρακτηρίσθηκε στην εποχή του «μεγαλειώδες οικοδόμημα μάθησης».

Υπήρξε από τους πρώτους ξένους φωτογράφους που απεικόνισαν την Ελλάδα πέρα από τα αρχαία μνημεία, δημοσιεύοντας δύο εξαιρετικά δημοφιλή λευκώματα, En Grèce (1932) και Retour en Gréce (1938). Πολύ λιγότερο γνωστό είναι το λεύκωμα που δημοσίευσε το 1950 με φωτογραφίες από τη Βραζιλία.

Τα δύο ελληνικά λευκώματα αναδημοσιεύθηκαν συχνά, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των ανάτυπων της πρώτης έκδοσης που κυκλοφόρησε το βιβλιοπωλείο Κάουφμαν (Αθήνα, 1948). Συνοδεύονται από πληθωρικά κείμενα του επίσης συνεργάτη της Γαλλικής Σχολής Fernand Chapoutier: «Ο αναγνώστης ίσως περιμένει να βρει μόνον ερείπια στο βιβλίο αυτό. Η όψη της Ελλάδας που του προσφέρεται είναι συγχρόνως λιτότερη και πλουσιότερη, απελευθερωμένη από μύθους. Δεν είναι φτιασιδωμένη για να υποδεχθεί ξένους. Για να την απεικονίσουμε, δεν βασισθήκαμε στην τεχνική – ούτε εκπληκτικά σημεία θέασης, ούτε εξεζητημένη εναλλαγή φακών. Πήραμε τον δρόμο μας σαν καλοπροαίρετοι και περίεργοι τουρίστες· όποτε ξεπρόβαλε μπροστά μας κάποια ωραία εικόνα, αρκούσε μια Kodak τσέπης για να την απαθανατίσει. Ποτέ δεν αναζητήσαμε σπάνια θεάματα, ούτε φωτογραφίσαμε την αγρότισσα με τα γιορτινά της”.

CHANGE 12.03.10

2010-03-12T17:44:00.002+02:00

12 March 2010, 5:25 pm

RON HASELDEN'S POSTCARDS

2010-03-12T10:27:00.000+02:00

Ron Haselden's ongoing 'Postcard' series started in early 2008. They are arrangements of sets of photographs which are emailed out to people all over the world as virtual postcards, marking ideas and moments throughout the years. The images, mostly of Brittany, where Haselden has his home, reflect aspects of a constantly changing landscape.

BERLIN IMAGES

2010-03-10T10:41:00.005+02:00

Kai-Olaf Hesse: file 0552

Kai-Olaf Hesse: file 5905

Hansgert Lamber's ex pose verlag, the independent Berlin photographic publisher, pioneered the concept of a uniform series of elegant, minimalist artists' books under the name edition365. With a print run of 365 numbered copies, the edition is meant to provide photographers and other artists with a place for smaller work, for work-in-progress, an exhibition catalogue or simply a give-away.

Latest in the series is Kai-Olaf Hesse's 05/09 (from the digital files), a gleaning of transitory but compelling images snatched from the urban landscape.

HUNTERS

2010-03-09T09:33:00.001+02:00

A shooting party at Modi farm, on the Chalkidiki peninsula, Northern Greece, in the mid-1950s.

CHANGE 07.03.10

2010-03-07T11:36:00.004+02:00

7 March 2010, 7:30 am

EVIDENCES OF COMMONPLACE TIME

2010-03-05T12:00:00.004+02:00

Mary Paraskeva, The Erechtheum, Athens, n.d.

Ian Jeffrey’s perceptive comments, below, specifically address the earliest amateur photographs taken with the Kodak celluloid-based films of 1890, but they apply equally well to amateur travel photography of the rest of the 20th century – indeed, to virtually all amateur snapshot photography, irrespective of period or technology. They certainly apply to the quasi-totality of contemporary cellphone photography.

“The problem which emerged in 1889 was – as it had been in 1839 – one of intention or ‘commission’. What kind of pictures could or should be taken with these new cameras? Travellers could buy competent photographs of tourist sites all over the world, and if they were interested in geography and anthropology there were comprehensive sets of stereocards available, which covered almost any topic. That left accidents of travel, encounters, mere contingencies, and it is precisely these subjects that appear on the earliest Kodak rolls: street-scenes, pieces of landscape, small events. [..] Nor was it clear what should be done with the pictures afterwards, for if they were of minor events of travel they could hardly be cherished. In fact the round Kodak pictures of 1889-90 were little more than reminders or prompts: a hotel in Switzerland, a terrace overlooking an Italian lake, the shore of the Adriatic. That is, a snapshot of 1889 had a moment of maximal use when its author recalled time and place for the benefit of friends, but thereafter it could only fall into desuetude, its narratives forgotten. The more this happens, the more mysterious and even tragic these pictures become, for they exist as evidence of commonplace time, merely lived through.”

Ian Jeffrey, Revisions: An Alternative History of Photography, p.66. National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford 1999. ISBN 0 948489 60 X.

ON THE USES OF PHOTOGRAPHY

2010-03-05T08:52:00.001+02:00

The sign reads “Bring us any photograph you want and we will turn it into cake”. I’m not normally a fan of text-based cuteness, but if it helps, you can think of this snap as a gloss on the post-digital vernacular applications of photographic imagery. Found in Crete by Penelope Petsini and Nikos Panayotopoulos.

Όλα είναι τούρτα. Το σχόλιο αυτό πάνω στις δημώδεις χρήσεις της μεταψηφιακής φωτογραφίας στη Μεγαλόνησο οφείλουμε στην Πηνελόπη Πετσίνη και τον Νίκο Παναγιωτόπουλο.

ATHENIAN & ARCHAEOLOGICAL

2010-03-04T10:21:00.002+02:00

The Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Strasbourg recently organised a small exhibition based on the Adolf Michaelis collection of some 2,300 mid-19th century photographs of ancient Greek sites and monuments, accompanied by a modest 80-page catalogue. The photographers were the usual suspects (Henri Beck, Aloïs Beer, Paul des Granges, Paul Bette, Pascal Sébah, Philippos Margaritis, Dimitris Konstantinou and William Stillman), and many of the images will be familiar, illustrating once again the restricted range of subjects chosen by both foreign and Greek photographers of that period; as Martine Breuillot comments in an accompanying essay, "during the 1850s, photography in Greece was strictly Athenian and archaeological". Sensibly, the most dramatic image, a panoramic view of Piraeus harbour by des Granges, has been placed on the cover of the catalogue, which includes extensive and informative captions (in French).

CHANGE 03.03.10

2010-03-03T09:44:00.004+02:00

3 March 2010, 8:20 am

Change: the first of an ongoing series.

A SPRING EXCURSION IN 1923

2010-03-02T09:15:00.007+02:00

Panayotis Fatseas, Excursion to the waterfalls of Mylopotamos, 1923

Panayotis Fatseas (1888-1938) was the first photographer to practice on the island of Kythera, southernmost of Greece’s seven Ionian islands. More than two thousand glass negatives, mostly portraits of his contemporaries, remained untouched from his death until 2002. Since then the surviving negatives, many badly damaged by damp, have been curated and catalogued, and Fatseas has been revealed as a major Greek photographic artist of the first half of the 20th century. An extensive exhibition of his work was shown at the Benaki Museum, Athens, in 2008, accompanied a 160-page monograph.

Παναγιώτης Φατσέας, Πρόσωπα των Κυθύρων, 1920-1938. tetarto editions, Athens 2008. 160 pp. ISBN 978 960 87948 4 9.

THE SMILES OF THE GENERALS

2010-03-01T10:20:00.004+02:00

“Je me rapelle une photographie du journal Excelsior. On y voyait les généraux grecs attendre le verdict. La distance entre la fatuité de leur grade et la peine de mort était trop grande pour qu’ils la parcourussent. Ils souriaient. Derrière eux la foule savait; cela se lisait sur les têtes.”

Jean Cocteau, Lettre a Jacques Maritain (1926)

“I remember a photograph in Excelsior magazine of the Greek generals awaiting the verdict of the court. The distance between the absurdity of their rank and the death penalty was too great for them to cover. They were smiling. However, the crowd behind them knew; you could see it in their eyes.”

Jean Cocteau, Letter to Jacques Maritain (1926)

I have never seen a copy of the photograph described by Cocteau, nor indeed do I feel I need to; perhaps that is why it remains for me a kind of platonic ideal of documentary photography. Partly of course because it sounds like the perfect distillation of a particularly dramatic historical moment, but mostly because it appears to reflect the workings of the gaze in photography with uncanny accuracy: the generals are smiling because they are looking at the camera, the crowd is grave because it is looking at the generals, and we in turn observe them almost a century later, at three removes from the action, through the gaze of the French writer.

«Θυμάμαι μια φωτογραφία του περιοδικού Excelsior. Έβλεπες τους Έλληνες στρατηγούς την ώρα που περίμεναν την απόφαση του στρατοδικείου. Η απόσταση μεταξύ της ματαιότητας του βαθμού των και της θανατικής καταδίκης ήταν πολύ μεγάλη για να τη διανύσουν. Χαμογελούσαν. Πίσω τους όμως, το πλήθος είχε καταλάβει· διαβαζόταν στα μάτια τους.»
Jean Cocteau, Γράμμα στον Jacques Maritain (1926)

Δεν μου δόθηκε ποτέ ευκαιρία να δω τη φωτογραφία που περιγράφει ο Cocteau, και ίσως για αυτόν ακριβώς το λόγο παραμένει για μένα ένα είδος πλατωνικού αρχέτυπου της φωτογραφικής τεκμηρίωσης. Εν μέρει γιατί φαίνεται να αποκρυσταλλώνει στην εντέλεια μια ιστορική στιγμή, κυρίως όμως επειδή αποτελεί ιδανικό παράδειγμα της λειτουργίας του βλέμματος στη φωτογραφία: οι στρατηγοί χαμογελούν επειδή κοιτάζουν τον φακό, το πλήθος διατηρεί τη σοβαρότητά του επειδή κοιτάζει τους στρατηγούς, και εμείς, τριπλά αποστασιοποιημένοι, τους παρατηρούμε σχεδόν έναν αιώνα αργότερα μέσα από το βλέμμα του Γάλλου λογοτέχνη.

MOUNT PARNES, GROUND ZERO

2010-02-28T11:59:00.009+02:00

The landscapes of Ektoras Dimissianos carefully skirt any hint of the picturesque, let alone of the lyrical - doubtful though it is whether many reserves of lyricism remain to be evoked by the hapless Greek landscape, riven by abuse and indifference. The great fires of 2007 and 2009 and their aftermath merely confirmed the consequences of that toxic mix of corruption, incompetence and feral greed which tend to distinguish Greek society’s engagement with the environment. In June 2007, a total of 14,000 acres of Mount Parnes were reduced to ashes in the space of a couple of days, including some two-thirds of an irreplaceable conifer forest, last significant woodlands of the greater Athens region.

The photographs taken by Dimissianos over the next few weeks and months depict a landscape transfigured; reminiscent of settings for a post-apocalyptic film, their uncanniness is emphasised by the acidic colours characteristic of cross-processing. The resulting chromatic aberrations echo the dislocation experienced by visitors to the site, as a mountain once familiarly cloaked in evergreens is suddenly painted a uniform ashen grey.

In the borderline between the burnt and the unburnt lurk the familiar marks of human encroachment: crumbling walls, drifts of rubbish, access roads and rubble. Surviving thanks to its function, the futuristic Hellenic Telecommunications Tower still stands majestically on the highest peak of the mountain. A few social activities take place on the fringes of the forest’s remains, including the bizarre open-air dance recorded by the photographer.

For the rest, Dimissianos’ photographs struggle to impart inchoate warnings, obscure portents of future disasters one can only guess at: targets pinned on trees, basements invaded by vegetation, the fractured remains of a warplane in a forest clearing. A deer looks out over the desolation, frozen in mid-step. Waiting for the next one.

Ektoras Dimissianos exhibited "Parnitha" at the MIET Gallery in Athens, October-November 2009, during the course of Athens Photo Festival '09.

SHOOTING

2010-02-28T09:03:00.003+02:00

"It is incredible how so many people can constantly misread speed to mean ease. This is certainly most common where photography is concerned. However simply because anyone can buy a camera, shutter away, and then with a slightly prejudiced eye justify the product does not validate the achievement. Shooting a target with a rifle is accomplished with similar speed and yet because the results are so objective no one suggests that marksmanship is easy."

Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (Doubleday, NY 2000), p.419.

From THREE HERACLITEAN ELEMENTS

2010-02-27T18:11:00.004+02:00