My entanglement with photography was accidental – when I was doing my army service, back in 2006, I had a lot of spare time so I toyed with a film camera I had acquired a while back. Soon, I was captivated by the photographic creation process, and photography became the most important part of my life. As for my passion, this is simple – when I make a good photograph, I experience fulfillment – you could say I am a photography junkie. Therefore, I am in constant pursuit of my next dose.
I would not say that most of my projects are conceptual. I consider myself a portrait photographer and only recently I started visualizing conceptual projects and begun working on them. On such a project (and on standalone portraits, indeed), my aim is to communicate feelings to the viewer. I have a soft spot for paranoia, melancholy and loneliness and naturally I try to express these feelings through my photos. Take Quiet House, for example – it’s a huge empty building up in a mountain near Athens that, upon sight, fills you with awe. I wanted to record its emptiness to the fullest, so I created the kind of characters which would express the feelings of being lost, of being alone, of the complete silence that characterizes such a setting.
After that first brief encounter with analog photography that started it all, I moved to digital. It was a choice based on the cost-effectiveness of the digital media, and obviously I thought that being able to see a photo immediately after I made it, was a godsend. However, I soon became disillusioned with the process – I realized I was spending more time in front of a computer screen than behind the camera. So, in 2008, I started migrating to analog, by acquiring a very old (and very cheap) medium format camera – it was a german Twin Lens Reflex camera dating back to 1958. This old beast yielded some magnificent photos and I was instantly hooked. Film changed my way of thinking – now I’m 99% analog. I keep digital around for specific uses (mostly concert photography and other kinds of photo-reportage) but my heart is not up to it – I only feel joy when I use film. You ask me about the difference? Film makes you think more – you don’t have instantaneous feedback, so you put more thought into a photograph before you take it. Film has soul, it has personality – it is made up from chemicals, it has grain, it has imperfections – it is alive and you can feel it. Many people may not agree with my opinion but, hey, it is the medium that allows me to express myself.
There is not a specific process to it. I have a lot of concepts in my mind, and I constantly look out for faces that match with my ideas. If I see a face that I want to photograph, sooner or later I pop the question. As it is obvious from my photographs, almost all of these faces are female – I have a weakness, I confess. Most girls are shy but quite a lot have no problem with posing for me. I can’t remember a really weird situation – photoshoots are usually joyous – we laugh a lot and we enjoy ourselves. One recent funny incident I can remember was during a fashion-like photoshoot: the model was wearing a wedding gown and we went to a grocery store at Kolonaki – on our way there everybody was looking at us and one guy stood with his mouth open as we were passing by and said loudly “oh how pretty she is” – luckily the model didn’t hear it at the time, she would have turned red out of embarrassment.
You got me there. I am ashamed to say that I have not studied the history of photography as much as I would like to. I see a lot of photographs but I never give them the time they deserve. I like the classic documentary photographers, H.C. Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt. However, I feel I am most influenced by portrait photographers like Francesca Woodman and Sally Mann. My latest discovery was Vivian Maier, nothing to do with portraits but a lot to do with photographic paranoia – this woman spent almost all of her life documenting the world around her with a Twin Lens Reflex camera, but she never showed any of her photographs to another human being – her work only became public when somebody bought her unexposed films – there were hundreds of them. This woman took photos and didn’t even bother to see the outcome – she was doing it for herself, for the joy she felt went she pressed the shutter… isn’t this photographic self-analysis a beautiful and mysterious thing?
I am emotionally attached to all of my photographs – each “good” photograph creates two moments of ecstasy, the one being when I press the shutter and think “I’ve got it” and the other when I see the result, days later, and I’m proven right. These twin moments of ecstasy are burned into my memory, and when I see the photographs later, I remember these moments and feel bliss. Obviously there are a lot of cases when I was proven wrong and I didn’t really get it – they are also remembered – you should love each failure as much as you love each success – you just needn’t feel happy about it.
What part of Athens inspires you and why?
I love the old neoclassical buildings of Athens – I love the way they were built, the way their space was arranged, their elegance and their style. Compared to modern buildings, they are inefficient and have a lot of imperfections – well, I think that their inefficiency gives them atmosphere – I am terribly bored of efficiency, it tends to be dull and devoid of life. I am obsessed with wooden floors, windows, dead corners, high ceilings. I don’t care much about the city itself – it is a great place to spend your night-time but a nightmare during day-time. I have to conclude that Athens, as a city, has never really inspired me.
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It was a great experience answering all these questions – I thought it would be easy but it soon became a two-way interaction. While every person has a definite knowledge of his/her likes and wants, his/her feelings and thoughts, the process of putting everything in words for another person to read is quite a trial and develops into a psychological tidying-up. Thank you for this gift..!