ARIS GEORGIOU Bathmedon*

I took pictures of friends, family, schoolmates. As souvenirs. When I was twelve or fourteen. In a roll of film from June 1969, showing preparations for graduation at the gymnasium, I found the picture which I recognized — almost forty years later — as my first serious photograph. I had no education in photography then, and could not have been referring to Kertesz, for instance, whose work I did not yet know. Amongst the elements which make up this photograph, it is clear that the man who carries a ladder — as he crosses the junction of Ermou with Korolou Diehl — plays a crucial part. It must have been because of him that I aimed my Retinette at the scene which was unfolding five storeys below our balcony. If he had not happened to carry that ladder — with its own intense geometry, and its shadow also, embossed beside him on the tarmac — he would probably have passed by unobserved.

I now wonder, after taking eighty thousand photos more or less — and over seven hundred photos with stairs or ladders in them — whether, through the intervening forty two years, that first photograph of 1969 has played a determining role in my photographic sub-conscious. It’s true that I was poised between a sense of the futility of such pictures, and a powerful compulsion to capture those scenes. This uncertainty came to an end when I read ‘Stairs’ by John Harvey, and realized that I had at least one fit observer of my moments of arbitrariness.

*Gradually / Step by Step