Bio
I have been involved in photography since 2016. I began a three-year course with Pavlos Pavlidis. Subsequently, there was a personal exploration into the approach and style of a photography teacher who could align as closely as possible with my mindset, culminating in another three-year seminar series with Vasilis Gerontakos, as well as a two-year seminar series with Hypatia Kornarou. I have participated in various group exhibitions, such as at the Apokentro Center curated by Pavlos Pavlidis, at Melina Mercouri curated by Dora Lavazou, at Luminus Eye, Porto Heli, and Aegina curated by Vasilis Gerontakos, and at Metapolis curated by Thodoris Veroniki. My photographs were also featured and presented at the festival showcasing the project “Circe: The Black Cut” by composer, pianist, and researcher Anna Stereopoulou.
My first memories of a camera are from when I was around 8-9 years old. I remember my mother holding it in her hands, taking commemorative photos. That exerted a very intense and deep fascination and curiosity on my childish eyes. It revealed to me a world where imagination could take form and shape. In my adolescence my father gave me my first camera as a gift. That is when I felt that the clicks were for me the visual words to express how I felt and saw the world around me. Of course, this happened more conscious much later, at the end of my student years, when I attended my first photography and darkroom classes. That is when I participated in my first group exhibition too.
Several years passed and the demanding and often harsh everyday life discouraged me, and prevented me from getting close to who I was, or who I felt I was when I expressed myself through photography.
In 2016, I acquired my first camera with my own earned money, and I began the long and endless journey into the world of photography.
At first, I was interested in photographing the expression, and emotion in portraits of strangers, but also of my familiar acquaintances. In my first photographic clicks I wondered if it was just an unconscious need that led me in wanting to make these human portraits immortal. Slowly, however, I discovered and felt that my photographic thirst and process contained within it an invisible redemption that only an image can give you. Because you begin to realize that the photograph is the one that possesses you; you don’t posses it.
All the more often Freud’s words came to my mind:
“we see because we seek to see
‘behind’ what we see, what we do not see”
In my photographs, I feel like I am walking on a delicate borderline between realistic clarity and an unconscious (selective) concealment of the exterior, but perhaps unconsciously and instinctively, mainly of the interior landscape of human forms.
In order to depict, through the fragile ambiguity and alteration of my photographic human portraits, the visible – and invisible – gateway to an “under-the-veils” introspection of a deeper and ethereal universe (world) of emotions that are laid bare in every photographic click (present) which obsessively balances between the grounding and take-off, of reality and dream, but also between the carnal (material) surface and its communicative bottom.
I create images to get lost, and find myself. I create images to be listened to by my own eyes. Or as Alejandra Pizarnik very aptly and profoundly writes when she says:
“The pleasure of losing yourself in the image foreseen.
I rose from my body and went out in search of who I am.
A pilgrim of my self I have gone to the one who sleeps in the winds of her country.”