ARIS GEORGIOU, PHOTOSYNKYRIA PEOPL

ARIS GEORGIOU, PHOTOSYNKYRIA PEOPLE

244 b/w photographs from the Parallaxis and Photosynkyria events. (Bilingual, greek-english). Text: Aris Georgiou. 52 pages, 30x24cm. Thessaloniki Museum of Photography for the Photobiennale 2008. Thessaloniki, April 2008.

 

ARIS GEORGIOU
PHOTOSYNKYRIA / PEOPLE

Somewhere from the depths of my memory, from the time when I was starting out in photography, the phrase “Les gens ne comptent pas pour du beurre”—people are not just decorative– dredges up. It was the title of an interview with Guy Le Querrec in a French photography magazine of that period, the 70s. The journalist had focused on Le Querrec’s genuine human interest in people, who in the end were the true content of his important photographs. When, some twentyfive years later, I met him and quoted back to him his own phrase, which had left an indelible mark on me, he had no memory of it at all. Moreover he gave me the impression that the issue did not concern him in the same way it once had. This created some uncertainty in me, probably unfounded, and caused me to become conscious of how photography often finds itself “outside the photographer”. How much the content of the depiction, the image of reality on the photosensitive transparency is nothing but an intangible and lifeless note, a poor reminder of sensation that cannot be repeated. I knew then, that people “do not count only as butter” on our bread, they are not decorative, they are not simple apparitions that the lens captures, they are not mere shapes and masses that are crystallized in a beautiful composition, or in an abstraction, establishing the “work of art”. People are. Or were.

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