Ta Nea (People Supplement, 1999)
The obsession of Greeks to find Greek roots in all scientific and artistic achievements is well-known. However, photography as an artistic medium does not have old roots in our country. Its commemorative function developed significantly, especially in areas with urban population growth. In Constantinople, Athens, Corfu, Ermoupolis, and other major urban centers, good professional photographers appeared who captured moments and faces. However, there was no conscious cultivation of photography as personal expression, while by the end of the last century, significant artistic personalities had emerged in Western Europe and America. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that artistic (or creative, as it is also called) photography systematically made its appearance in our country from the 1970s onwards. It was the time when the work of important foreign photographers, already recognized for years in the West, reached us. These photographers became the starting point and inspiration for what one could call "new Greek photography."
The absence of an organized photographic artistic tradition in our country did not prevent the emergence of individual creators, who consciously or subconsciously composed a collectively noteworthy and personal artistic proposal. These photographers could be characterized as pioneers only in terms of their chronological first appearance, not as the starting point of a Greek photography drawing its subjects or style from them. However, the work of these individual photographers spread and was appreciated very recently, after our contact with artistic photography from abroad led us to search for, look at, and appreciate the photographers who operated in Greece in previous decades.
The problem with old photography, apart from its identification, is its collection, preservation, and archiving, so that everyone interested can access it. This task can be undertaken by museums and other institutions, public or private. The most serious and significant activity in this field has been developed in our country by the Benaki Museum. There are, of course, individual private collectors of old photographs, but most often these are people whose interest and knowledge have to do more with the antiquity and thematology of the photographs rather than with the identity of the photographers and the artistic value of their work.
The well-known pioneers of Greek photography are not too many, but not so few as to fit within the scope of a small tribute. Moreover, now that interest in photography has grown, it is very likely that many others will be discovered. Of the four photographers presented in this tribute, three are no longer alive, but their work is preserved and utilized in the best way by the Benaki Museum. The fourth, Kostas Balafas, continues to photograph and hopefully will continue for many more years.
Benaki Museum
The Benaki Museum started collecting photographs as part of its historical and folklore role. Very quickly, the Museum's management, led by its director Angelos Delivorrias, realized that some photographers had created a personal work whose artistic value complemented and often surpassed the historical significance of the photographs. Thus, the Benaki Museum's photography department, directed by Fani Konstantinou and with the valuable collaborator Eirini Boudouri, now hosts the work of important photographers like Voula Papaioannou, Nelly's, Dimitris Harissiadis, and others. The department has the appropriate equipment and trained personnel to maintain negatives and archive the entire body of work. In parallel, the Museum has developed a highly commendable activity in the field of photographic exhibitions and publications.
Voula Papaioannou
Voula Papaioannou was born in 1898 and died in 1990. Coming from an urban family, she received a solid classical education. She was involved in the arts and took lessons in painting and conservation of antiquities. After her forties, she decided to devote herself entirely to photography for the next twenty to thirty years until an eye disease deprived her of this joy. In 1976, she entrusted her photographic archive to the Benaki Museum.
Voula Papaioannou never photographed in a studio. Greek nature and ancient monuments were her favorite subjects until the outbreak of the war. During the war, she photographed the daily life of the inhabitants of Athens, and after liberation, she took charge of the photographic department of UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Her war and liberation photographs constitute the most prominent and known part of her work, but this does not do justice to the thousands of excellent photographs she took before and after. Like the work of most Greek photographers, old and new, her work has not yet been gathered in a relatively complete monograph. However, it seems that we will soon have this pleasure as the Benaki Museum, in collaboration with Agra Publications, is preparing a major tribute.
It is not known, at least to the writer, whether the photographer was aware of international photographic trends and had been in contact with the work of great photographers of her time. Nonetheless, one must admit that her photographs constitute a set that stands with artistic merits against any other work of photographers rightly considered as benchmarks of photographic art. The significance of her thematology for post-war Greece, combined with the photographic illiteracy of the time, shifted all the interest towards the aspect of historical recording. However, Papaioannou's work far exceeds, certainly interesting, historical recording.
Papaioannou usually used a square format. She used it with exceptional mastery, avoiding formalistic excesses and imparting a naturalness to the artful and staged nature of the square frame. Sometimes, out of a desire for perfection in the image, she chose to crop her frame post-capture, which almost never improved it, so instinctively correct and complete was her initial framing. Her main value and ability lay in something that is part of every artistic edifice. She confronted opposing emotions by interweaving the subject with its morphological presentation and internal content in such a way that the viewer could travel within the photograph and read it from many different sides. Like in real life, in Papaioannou's photographic world, things were never unambiguous, only tragic or only comic. It was an achievement that she managed to render, with small square images, pain, joy, dignity, hope, all with a discreet yet bold use of photographic form. Our eye is attracted sometimes by a smile, to appreciate immediately after the solid framing, and sometimes by the original composition, to quickly discover that it leads to a harsh observation. All this with an organic naturalness that evidences artistic sincerity and respect towards what was in front of her lens. Her love for her subjects, and apparently for photography itself, saved her from slips and excesses that contemporaries, possibly more skilled than her, have not avoided.
Nelly’s
Ellie Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, better known as Nelly’s from her artistic pseudonym used in America, was born in 1899 in Asia Minor, studied photography in Germany, and opened a photography studio in Athens in 1925, where she worked photographing famous Athenians until 1939. From then until 1965, she settled in New York, where she also worked as a photographer. After returning to Athens, she gave up the profession. In 1985, she donated her archive to the Benaki Museum. She died in 1998.
While Voula Papaioannou was initially ignored by artistic circles, Nelly’s was perhaps overestimated, with the undeniably sometimes high quality of her work suffering under the weight of a sudden and excessive reputation. This observation may be considered sacrilegious by some, but it is probably a fact that the extravagances of the genus did their miracle again. The need to quickly find a strong Greek photographic name (and, as always, even better if it had served abroad) led to an overabundance of praise and disproportionate production of publications for a photographic work that, although it had many good moments, remained focused on a somewhat simplistic neoclassicism with romantic tendencies and symbolic outbursts during the most fertile period of photographic modernism. The photographic analogies between ancient statues and portraits of modern Greeks and the melodramatic expressive (?) poses of nude dancers on the Acropolis may have secured admiration for those who saw photography as an artistic game, but they did not engage in dialogue with the great photography being done in Germany and America at the time.
From her photographs, one can distinguish those where ancient monuments are simply photographed without the interposing dancers, a few portraits of tradesmen and craftsmen, and perhaps a few landscapes. However, the most important thing is that her body of work does not exude coherence, unity, and vision, while her relationship with the internal formalistic function of the image is very weak. Her photographs sometimes resemble tableaux vivants of the past century and other times impersonal tourist and professional shots.
After carefully examining Nelly’s work and distinguishing the few really good from the many indifferent photographs, one is left with some unanswered questions. First, might there have been other professional photographers in Greece with at least comparable virtues to Nelly’s but remained unjustifiably in the dark? Second, might Nelly’s herself have in her archive other better images without the picturesque character of those that became established? And third, why must domestic critical thought be characterized by a permanent lack of measure, which ultimately harms those who are overestimated?
Dimitris Harissiadis
Dimitris Harissiadis was born in Kavala in 1911. He studied chemistry. He died in Athens in 1993. The Benaki Museum incorporated his very large and well-organized archive into its photographic department. Harissiadis began photographing the '40s epic when he himself had been enlisted. To some extent, he followed Papaioannou’s thematology, but later, in 1956, he opened a photographic agency under his name, which he maintained until 1985. Harissiadis photographed professionally for many clients, private individuals, or public organizations, but at the same time, as he himself stated, he never ceased to do his personal, amateur work, as he called it.
What characterizes Harissiadis’s photographs, at least those that stand out qualitatively both from his amateur and professional output, is a calmness and self-restraint. No excess either in emphasizing emotions or in formalistic construction. His framing did not have the dynamism of Papaioannou, and his emotionalism did not invade his photography, as happens with Balafas. This phlegmatic distance serves with modesty the harmony and sense of duration. The fact that for so many years Harissiadis, through his respect for this harmony, made a significant personal work while with the same quality engaged in a profession can only increase our admiration and respect for him.
Kostas Balafas
Kostas Balafas was born in Epirus, studied dairy science, and then started working at the Electric Company, later known as DEI, where he remained until his retirement. He began photographing during the war, continued photographing for DEI, but also subjects that concerned him, and continues to this day to travel Greece and photograph with the same passion.
The particularity of Kostas Balafas lies in the fact that he feels pain for his place, identifies with its subjects, but at the same time does a robust and clear photographic work. This uniqueness extends to his speech, when he describes the real shooting conditions and his love for the people he photographs, while at the same time subtly articulating very sharp artistic comments. The particularity of Kostas Balafas lies finally in the sense of duty with which he performs his work. A duty towards his world, towards the culture he knew and sees changing, but (very importantly) also a duty towards photographic art. His work stems from respect and leads to respect.
Perhaps the only reservation one might express about him and his work is that his attachment to the subject prevents him from seeing or choosing significant photographs, which are sure to be hidden in the corners of his photo-filled house. The same attachment to the subject and respect for it pushed him to publish a book of his photos from the Resistance at his own expense. Let's hope that soon will come the time for the publication of a comprehensive monograph of his work.
Plato Rivellis