It takes a certain amount of courage to write a book on contemporary Greek photography: writing about one’s own time, an era that has yet to come to an end, can be more challenging than looking back into the past. Another difficulty is that one writes about the living. This complicates the selection process of available materials and bestows upon authors the uneasiness that their living subjects might begrudge them their interpretation, if it does not coincide with their own. More importantly, in the case of Greek photography, one writes in a bibliographical vacuum: scholarly studies on and histories of Greek photography can be counted on the fingers of one hand, partly because photography has been until recently regarded to be something of a lesser art. There is Alkis Xanthakis’s History of Greek Photography, 1981, a pioneering work for its time, which is now regarded to be to a certain extent dated, and does not go beyond the year 1960. [i] To this one could add exhibition catalogues, which contain lucid essays, such as John Stathatos’s Image and Idol, 1997 [ii], or Aspects de la photographie hellenique, 1998 [iii], and the recent well-produced volume Greece through Photography: 160 Years of Visual Testimony, 2008 [iv]. There are obviously numerous worthy PhD studies, which remain unpublished to this day.

Kostas Ioannidis’s Contemporary Greek Photography: A Century in Thirty Years is not a history of Greek photography of the last 30 years, but in the view of such a gap it indubitably serves as one. Beginning with the mid-1970s, the volume openly converses with John Stathatos’s Image and Idol, having the same starting point in the mid-1970s. However, Ioannidis does not provide any historical landmarks for this choice of periodisation and refrains from using Greek history as an interpretive tool for photography, preferring to work within the limits of the genre and to discuss developments in style and subject as inclined by the medium itself and professed by photographers. The book is intended to serve as a guide to Greek photography of the last 30 years and includes an impressive number of photographers. It manages to succeed in this aim. Illustrations of high quality — usually no more than two for each photographer — are to be found aplenty. Its biggest asset as a study is its structure: in seven chapters Ioannidis gives a comprehensive overview of contemporary Greek photography, which is illuminating both to the layman and the expert. It should be pointed out that the chapters are not arranged merely around themes; they also theorise about pivotal issues in the visual arts. For example, Chapter 3 tackles serial photography as a manifestation of ‘spleen’, while Chapter 4 regards ‘speech acts’, a notion that was first introduced by the linguist JL Austin in 1962 [v], as salient for the development of photographic performance, where the printed photograph is no more than the apogee of a multifaceted action that takes several directions. Ioannidis, a trained art historian, begins each chapter with a lucid section on theory, and subsequently provides examples.

Being faithful to a classicist notion that sees photography as a compromise between the object’s independent existence and the human gaze, Ioannidis deliberately leaves out digital creation, what one could otherwise call ‘photographic fiction’. However, given the wide scope of the book, it is not entirely clear whether this is an ideological choice or one that sees this kind of fiction as too complicated a subject to be included in a general study.

The book suffers from a malady, which — understandably — afflicts most studies intending to chart a bibliographical gap: it tries to include too much. This often results in long lists of names and works with an analysis that does not exceed one paragraph. If the book intends to chart a vacuum indeed, perhaps it lacks patience; themes succeed each other at such a speed it is difficult for readers to digest the information or, worse, to see the connection between different artists and works. If its objective is to educate an audience on its subject matter, it misses certain opportunities to do so. For example, in Chapter 1 which discusses the body as a piece of sculpture, Ioannidis examines photography as a demystifying devise and makes a historical leap into the Enlightenment: ‘the human body’s inaccessibility as one of the most important altars was violated by the Enlightenment with the establishment of a whole methodology of demystifying representation’ (p. 43, my translation). With this phrase the author introduces a significant subject, but does not do it justice just by mentioning it in passing. Readers often feel they are reminded of facts they ought to know beforehand: e.g. in a passage which examines Greek landscape and its unique consistency the author makes a comparison with the author Periklis Yannopoulos and his reception in the 1930s, a comparison which remains obscure because of the lack of further clarification. Important people are introduced by their surname (e.g. Duncan, Sherman). In the absence of photographic scholarship, particularly of the kind that links photography with general aesthetics and the other visual arts, any piece of theory, doctrine or simple fact, however trivial it might seem to the sophisticated audience or to the author himself, might make a difference. On top of that, the book lacks specific technical documentation: there is no mention of new techniques that were introduced during these 30 years or of old ones which have outlived their times. Digital photography is discussed only in the context of montage and the manipulation of negatives, rather than in the broad context of the possibilities it provides to photography.

These minor faults, which could be corrected in a revised second edition, wither nevertheless in the light of the book’s general contribution to the study of photography and the general discussion of its aesthetics as a contemporary art. The all too important statement made in the book is the consideration of Greek photography in the context of themes which are defined by aesthetic inclination and theory rather than subject matter. More significantly, one should underscore its significance in the making of a scholarly tradition and the making of an art: as long as photography is an industrial art form growing on technology and contemporary lifestyle, as well as an art that has only been recently established in institutions of mass education, such as the museum and the university, its study is not just a reflection of developments but also a way of inducing them.


[i] Alkis Xanthakis, History of Greek Photography 1839–1960, Kastaniotis, Athens, 1981.
[ii] John Stathatos, Image and Idol: The New Greek Photography 1975–1995, Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Cultural Capital of Europe and Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 1997.
[iii] Aspects de la photographie hellenique, Ministère de la culture hellenique, Mairie de Nice, 1998.
[iv] Spyros Asdrachas, Alexandra Moschovi, Aliki Tsirgialou (eds), Greece through Photography: 160 Years of Visual Testimony, forwarded by John Stathatos, Melissa, Athens, 2008.
[v] JL Austin, How to Do Things with Words, first published in 1962.