Camera Graeca Photographs Narratives Materialities 2015

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:54 08 June 2017
Materialities
Camera Graeca:
Photographs, Narratives,
Publications 16
King’s College London
Centre For Hellenic Studies
Camera Graeca:
Photographs,
Narratives,
Materialities
edited by
Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and
Eleni Papargyriou
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition and English translations © 2015 the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s
College London
The Centre for Hellenic Studies asserts the right of Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis
and Eleni Papargyriou to be named as editors of the book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Camera graeca : photographs, narratives, materialities / edited by Philip Carabott, Yannis
Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-2476-1 (hardcover)
1. Photography--Greece--History. 2. Photography--Social
aspects--Greece. 3. Photographers--Greece. 4. Greece--History--Sources. I. Carabott,
Philip, editor. II . Hamilakis, Yannis, 1966- editor. III . Papargyriou, Eleni, 1976- editor.
TR75.C36 2015
770.9495--dc23
2014045786
ISBN 9781472424761 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315570761 (ebk)
THE CENTRE FOR HELLE NIC STUDIES ,

KING’S COLLE GE LO NDON, PUBLI CATIO NS 16
Contents
List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xix
Introduction
Capturing the Eternal Light: Photography and Greece,

Photography of Greece 3
Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou
Part I: Imag(in)ing the Nation
1 The Three-way Mirror:

Photography as Record, Mirror and Model of Greek National Identity 25
John Stathatos
2 Greece as Photograph: Histories, Photographies, Theories 53

Alexandra Moschovi
3 Photographing Greece in the Nineteenth Century: An Overview 77

Aliki Tsirgialou
4 Doors into the Past: W.J. Stillman (and Freud) on the Acropolis 95
Frederick N. Bohrer
5 Photographing the Present, Constructed with the Past:

Pascal Sébah’s Photographic Mediation of Modernisation in
Nineteenth-century Greece 113
Heather E. Grossman
v
vi Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
Part II: Photographic Narratives,

Alternative Histories
6 The Photographic and the Archaeological: The ‘Other Acropolis’ 133

Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis
7 Greece through the Stereoscope:

Constituting Spectatorship through Texts and Images 159

Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakiti
8 Archaeology of Refraction:
Temporality and Subject in George Seferis’s Photographs 169
Theodoros Chiotis
9 Textual Contexts of Consumption: The Greek Literary Photobook 193

Eleni Papargyriou
Part III: Photographic Matter-Realities:

Photography as Propaganda
10 Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor: Arnold and Rosalind Toynbee’s

Frames of the Greco-Turkish War in Anatolia (1919–1922) 213
Georgios Giannakopoulos
11 Nelly’s Iconography of Greece 233

Katerina Zacharia
12 War Photographs Re-used: An Approach to the

Photograph Collection of the Memorial Museum of the
Battle of Sarandaporo 257
Eleni Kouki
Part IV: Photographic Ethnographies:

The Dispersal of Photographic Objects
13 From ‘Here and Now’ to ‘Then and There’:

Reflections on Fieldwork Photography in the 1960s 277
Margaret E. Kenna
14 Pictures of Exile, Memories of Cohabitation:

Photography, Space and Social Interaction in the Island of Ikaria 295
Elena Mamoulaki
Contents vii
15 Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images:

Photographic (Re)engagements in Sfakia, Crete 313
Konstantinos Kalantzis
16 Projecting Places: Personal Photographs,

Migration and the Technology of (Re)location 337
Penelope Papailias
Afterword
Photography and Greece – A Historian’s Perspective 361

Ludmilla Jordanova
Index 367
This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Figures
1.1 James Robertson, Temple of Olympian Zeus from the west, 1853–54 27
1.2 Philibert Perraud, The ladies-in-waiting of Queen Amalia, 1847 29
1.3 Unknown photographer, Extension of the Athens-Piraeus line from
Monastiraki to Omonoia, c. 1895. 31
1.4 Rhomaides and Zeitz, The aristocracy of Athens ministering to the
wounded in Filipiada, 1912 35
1.5 Panayotis Fatseas, Grigoria Kassimatis and Areti Megalokonomos, 1924 40
1.6 Fréderic Boissonnas, Kalokairinou Avenue, Herakleion, 1920 42
1.7 Nelly, Cretans, 1939 43
1.8 Voula Papaioannou, Athens 1941–42, from Hellas 1941–1942 47
1.9 Kostas Balafas, ‘Aris and Sarafis’, 1944, from The Andartiko in Epirus 48
1.10 Kostas Balafas, ‘The people admire them’, 1944, from
The Andartiko in Epirus 49
2.1 Voula Papaioannou, Men following a tractor, being trained in its use,
1945–46 59
2.2 Dimitris Harissiadis, Factory, Thessaly and Western Macedonia,
June 1957 61
2.3 Nikos Panayotopoulos, Untitled, from the Chapels series (1978–88) 65
2.4 Petros Efstathiadis, ‘Bar’, 2010, from the series Liparo (2008–12) 69
2.5 Panos Kokkinias, ‘Prespes’, from the series Leave Your Myth in Greece
(2011) 71
3.1 Alfred-Nicolas Normand, The Arch of Adrian with the Acropolis in

the background, 1851 82
3.2 Rhomaides Brothers, Syntagma Square, Athens, c. 1900 85
3.3 Zachariades Brothers, Korai Street, Athens, c. 1895 86
3.4 Andreas Vlachakis, Syros, c. 1880 87
3.5 Bartolomeo Borri, Corfu, c. 1885 89
4.1 Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, ‘Parthenon at Athens,’ from

Excursions Daguerriennes, 1842 97
4.2 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Façade and north colonnade of
the Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, 1842 98
4.3 William J. Stillman, ‘Western Portico of the Parthenon’, from
The Acropolis of Athens, illustrated picturesquely and architecturally in
photography, 1870 102
ix
x Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
4.4 William J. Stillman, ‘Profile of the Eastern façade, showing the

curvature of the stylobate’, from The Acropolis of Athens,
illustrated picturesquely and architecturally in photography, 1870 103
4.5 William J. Stillman, ‘Interior of the Parthenon, Athens’, from
The Acropolis of Athens, illustrated picturesquely and architecturally in
photography, 1870 105
5.1 Pascal Sébah, ‘25. Les Propylèes. Vue interieure’, 1872–1875 118
5.2 Pascal Sébah, ‘42. Vue Générale de l’intérieur du Parthénon’, 1872–1875 120
5.3 Pascal Sébah, ‘81. Perspective de la Colonnade Sud du Temple de
Thesée’, 1872–1875 123
5.4 Pascal Sébah, ‘18. L’Acropole vue prise de la gare de Chemin de Fer’,
1872–1875 124
5.5 Pascal Sébah, ‘88. Église Byzantine St. Théodore’, 1872–1875 126
6.1 Two photographic projects on the Acropolis: J.-F. Bonhomme’s book

project with Jacques Derrida, and Lizzie Calligas’s Metoikesis 141
6.2 Fotis Ifantidis, Remnants of Muslim tombstones on the Acropolis 145
6.3 Fotis Ifantidis, An ancient architectural fragment from the
Erechtheion with an 1805 Ottoman inscription (26-10-2007) 146
6.4 Fotis Ifantidis, Slippery surfaces 147
6.5 Fotis Ifantidis, The Acropolis as a site of inscription and commemoration 149
6.6 Fotis Ifantidis, A small mosque resurfaces at the foothill of the
Acropolis (2-6-2007) 150
6.7 Fotis Ifantidis, At the new Acropolis Museum (25-10-2009) 151
7.1 Unknown photographer, Market day at Sparta, Peloponnese,

c. 1897–1907 165
7.2 Unknown photographer, Messene, Peloponnese:
‘Picturesque interior of a modern Greek villager’s home,
Messene, Greece’, c. 1897–1907 165
8.1 George Seferis, Alona, Cyprus, 1954 179

8.2 George Seferis, Poros shipyard, 1940 181
8.3 George Seferis, Tolo, 1938 186
8.4 George Seferis, London, 1924 188
8.5 George Seferis, Korytsa, 1937 189
9.1 Michel Fais, from The City on her Knees, 2002 203
9.2 Michel Fais, from The City on her Knees, 2002 204
9.3 Petros Nikoltsos, from Los Angeles, 2007 205
9.4 Petros Nikoltsos, from Los Angeles, 2007 206
9.5 Christos Chryssopoulos, from Flashlight between the Teeth, 2012 207
List of Figures xi
10.1 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee at the British School of

Athens c. 1911–12 218
10.2 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee in Usak, 4 February 1921 222
10.3 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee in Usak, 4 February 1921 223
10.4 Unknown photographer, Muslim women and children waiting to be
evacuated at a quay somewhere in the Gemlik peninsula,
c. May–July 1921 224
10.5 Unknown photographer, Child from Pazarkeni mutilated by

bomb thrown into house by Armenian Chettis, c. May–July 1921 229
11.1 Nelly, Collage of Greek physiognomies exhibited in the

Greek Pavilion in New York World Fair, 1939 239
11.2 Nelly, Collages exhibited in the Greek Pavilion in
New York World Fair, 1939 242
11.3 Nelly, Collage for the Metaxas regime’s youth (EON) 246
11.4 Unknown photographer, Kotzias with Third Reich officials in
Dresden, 1936 249
11.5 Nelly, Photo on the cover of Life magazine (16 December 1940) 251
12.1 Unknown photographer, Transportation of injured at the Battle of

Sarandaporo out of Elassona, c. 1912–1913 259
12.2 Unknown photographer, The minaret from where the imam was
shooting at the Greek army as it entered the city, c. 1912–1913 260
12.3 Unknown photographer, Peasant women bid farewell to their
husbands leaving for the front, c. 1912–1913 268
12.4 Unknown photographer, The return from the war, c. 1912–1913 269
12.5 Unknown photographer, King Constantine helping an injured
soldier onto his car, c. 1912–1913 270
12. 6 Unknown photographer, The assembling of the Greek army in
Larisa, c. 1912–1913 271
13.1 Margaret Kenna, Another camera at the festival? 8 September 1966 278

13.2 Margaret Kenna, Threshing with mules, summer 1967 283
13.3 Margaret Kenna, ‘The last curtained bed on the island’, 1967 287
13.4 Margaret Kenna, A café proprietor: behind him is a photo of
his wife and her sister, baking bread, 1966 288
13.5 Margaret Kenna, Three ‘wolves’ and two ‘cats’ in a photo taken in
January 1967 289
14.1 Kostantinos Petroyannis, Group of exiles in Koudoumas village,

c. 1947–1949 299
14.2 Stelios Kassimatis, Group of exiles transfer stones in a human
chain for the community works in Evdilos village, c. 1947–1949 300
xii Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
14.3 Unknown photographer, Group of exiles working for the road of

Arethousa village, c. 1947–1949 301
14.4 Unknown photographer, Group of exiles reading and writing
newspapers in the village of Agios Polykarpos, c. 1947–1949 301
14.5 Elena Mamoulaki, Inner view of Christos Malahias’ photography
shop, September 2010 305
15.1 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Nikos Karkanis showing me a framed,

magnified picture of his father 317
15.2 Konstantinos Kalantzis, At a corner of the living room 320
15.3 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Two postcards placed on the wall by a
friend of the sitters 321
15.4 Nelly, ‘Man from Sfakia 1939’ 327
15.5 Nelly, ‘Men from Sfakia 1939’ 329
16.1 The photo album Florin Gjokaj sent home to his parents with
photographs from 1993 to 1995 342
16.2 Yonka Yankova Nencheva’s family back in Bulgaria,
toast to her in Greece on New Year’s, Plovdiv, 2007 345
16.3 Aris Losis’s visit to the supermarket during the first days of
his migration to Greece, Volos, 1997 350
16.4 Burbuqe Durresi posing in bikini, Durrës, 1975 (left) and Vlorë,
1987 (right) 351
16.5 Vaso Skentra with her children in front of the Hilton in Athens, 2004 352
16.6 Greek Orthodox Easter celebration at Florin Gjokaj’s home,
Dimini, 1994 353
16.7 Teuta Sadiku’s son at a March 25th Greek Independence Day
celebration at his school, Volos, n.d. 355
Notes on Contributors
Frederick N. Bohrer teaches modern art history, art theory and visual culture
at Hood College, Maryland, USA. He has published numerous articles on
art, antiquities, exoticism and representation, specialising particularly in the
circulation through visual media of Western images of world antiquity. In 1999,
he curated the exhibition Antoin Sevruguin and the Persian Image at the Freer/
Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is the
author of Orientalism and Visual Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
and Photography and Archaeology (University of Chicago Press, 2011). He is now
at work on a book about travel, identity and photography, focused particularly
on highlighting the fluid conceptions of the nineteenth century and recent
attempts to recuperate them.
Philip Carabott is a Research Associate at King’s College London, where he

taught modern and contemporary Greek history between 1990–2011. He has
published on politics, society and minorities in Greece of the modern era, and
edited and contributed to Greece and Europe in the Modern Period: Aspects of a
Troubled Relationship (KCL, 1995), Greek Society in the Making, 1863–1913:
Realities, Symbols and Visions (Ashgate, 1997), The Greek Civil War: Essays on a
Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences (Ashgate, 2004).
Theodoros Chiotis studied Classics in London and Oxford and Modern

Languages in Oxford, where he is currently a doctoral candidate. He has worked
as a researcher in Open and Distance Learning for the Greek Open University.
He was previously the coordinator for the digitisation of literature textbooks
for the Greek Ministry of Education and for Greek private schools. He has
published academic articles on digital literature, Deleuze, autobiography, Greek
photography and Modern Greek literature. Theodoros is currently editing and
translating a collection of Modern Greek poetry to be published in English
soon. He is currently the Project Manager of the Cavafy Archive, housed in the
Onassis Foundation.
Georgios Giannakopoulos is currently a PhD student at Queen Mary, University

of London (School of History). His thesis focuses on conceptions of nationalism
and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain.
xiii
xiv Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
Heather E. Grossman teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

and has previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University
of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on medieval Mediterranean architectural
history and archaeology, and she has conducted fieldwork in France, Greece, and
Tunisia. She is the co-editor of Mechanisms of Exchange: Transmission in Medieval
Art and Architecture of the Mediterranean, ca. 1000–1500 (Brill, 2013) and the
author of Architecture and Interaction in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean:
Building Identity in the Medieval Morea (Ashgate, forthcoming 2015). Grossman’s

work also examines the reception of historical architecture in the modern era and
the history of photography. Her next research project centres on the Sébah and
Joailler photographic firm, the modern reception of archaeological monuments
and nation-building in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean.
Yannis Hamilakis is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

His main research interests include the bodily senses, archaeology and politics,
archaeology and national imagination, the link between the photographic and
the archaeological, archaeological ethnography, and the archaeology of Greece.
His books include The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National
Imagination in Greece (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Archaeology and the
Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (Cambridge University Press,
2013). He has also initiated the photo-ethnographic projects The Other Acropolis
(www.theotheracropolis.com) and Kalaureia in the Present (www.kalaureiainthe
present.org).
Fotis Ifantidis studied archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,

Greece. He has worked as an archaeologist in Greece and has co-supervised
the museological design of the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum’s permanent
exhibition. His academic research is focused on personal adornment practices
in prehistory, and on the interplay between photography and archaeology, with
case studies on the Neolithic settlement of Dispilio (visualizingneolithic.com),
the ancient city of Kalaureia on the island of Poros (kalaureiainthepresent.org)
and the Athenian Acropolis (theotheracropolis.com). Among his publications
are Spondylus in Prehistory (co-edited with M. Nikolaidou, Archaeopress, 2011)
and Archaeographies: Excavating Neolithic Dispilio (Archaeopress, 2013).
Kostas Ioannidis is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism in the

Department of Theory and History of Art, Athens School of Fine Arts. He
has written a book on contemporary photography in Greece and has published
on the methodology and history of the discipline of art history. His current
research interests include the technologies of seeing in Greece at the turn of the
nineteenth century and the Greek–USA relationships in the field of the visual
arts (1939–67).
Notes on Contributors xv
Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of History and Visual Culture at Durham

University, where she is also a Co-director of the Centre for Visual Arts and
Cultures. Her most recent book is The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence
in Historical Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2012, which includes an essay
on The Family of Man photographic exhibition. She has written extensively on
images, science, medicine, and gender. Currently she is a Trustee of the Science
Museum Group, which includes the National Media Museum in Bradford where
the National Photographic Collection is housed.
Konstantinos Kalantzis studied history and archaeology in Crete (BA) as well

as anthropology in Oxford (MSc) and London (PhD, UCL). His primary work
concerns visuality, power and imagination in the Sphakia region of western Crete.
He has received scholarships from various institutions, including the AHRC and
the University of London. He was also the recipient of a Mary Seeger O’ Boyle
fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. He is currently working on
questions of materiality and power in two archaeological projects and is involved in
a project about visuality and the Greek crisis. He has published works concerning
visual culture, power and imagination in Greek and English.
Margaret E. Kenna is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Swansea

University. She has carried out research in Greece over the past 45 years; her main
fields of interest include kinship, ritual, migration, exile and tourism. Her major
publications are: Greek Island Life: Fieldwork on Anafi (Harwood Academic, 2001)
and The Social Organisation of Exile: Greek Political Detainees in the 1930s (Harwood
Academic, 2001). She is in the course of donating all the photographs and slides she
has taken on Anafi and in Greece to the Benaki Museum Photographic Archive.
Eleni Kouki is a graduate of the Department of History and Archaeology at the

University of Ioannina, Greece. She holds an MA in history from the National
and Kapodistrian University of Athens, her thesis dealing with the construction
of the monument of the Unknown Soldier in Athens during the interwar period.
In 2009 she began her doctoral dissertation at the same university on historical
culture during the dictatorship of 1967–74.
Elena Mamoulaki is a Research Fellow at Durham University. She holds a PhD

in social anthropology from the University of Barcelona (2013). She received her
diploma in architecture from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, her MSc
in ‘Design-Space-Culture’ from the National Technical University of Athens
and her MA in anthropology from the University of Barcelona. She has taught
at the Department of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, at
the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, and at Columbia University. Her
research focuses on space, materiality, social memory and political conflict.
xvi Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
Alexandra Moschovi is an art historian, writer and curator and Senior Lecturer in
Photographic Theory at the University of Sunderland, UK. Her research focuses
on the history of twentieth-century Greek photography, theory of visual culture
and new technologies. Recent exhibitions and publications on Greek photography
include: Realities and Plausibilities (Galerie Xippas, 2010); ‘Re-Imag(in)ing Arcadia:
British Intervention in the Post-War Reconstruction of Greece, c. 1945–46’ in
Greece and Britain since 1945 (Scholars, 2009); and ‘The Pure and Unmediated
Photography’ in Dimitris Harissiadis (Benaki Museum, 2009). She has also co-
authored the survey volume Greece through Photographs (Melissa Publishing, 2007).
Eleni Mouzakiti is a photographer and independent scholar. She has taught

photography at the University of Ioannina and participated in numerous exhibitions
in Greece and abroad. Her works are to be found in the collections of the Portland
Art Museum (OR, USA), the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece,
and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. Her current research interests are
photography and memory, and photography and the romantic landscape.
Penelope Papailias teaches anthropology in the Department of History,

Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly in Volos,
Greece. She has written a book about the popular culture of historical production
in Greece, entitled Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). She is currently working on an ethnography of the
media event, as well as researching digital citizenship and social media networks
in crisis Greece.
Eleni Papargyriou is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London,

where she taught between 2009–13. She has held research and teaching positions
at Oxford University, Princeton University and the University of Ioannina,
Greece. She has published the monograph Reading Games in the Greek Novel
(Legenda, 2011) and numerous articles on intertextuality and the novel, the
cultural implications of (self )translation and the rapport between literary text and
photographic image. She is currently working on a book-length project on the
Greek literary photobook. She is in the editorial board and reviews editor for the
Journal of Greek Media and Culture.
John Stathatos is a photographer and writer, born in Athens in 1947. His personal
work has been exhibited in many European venues. The survey exhibition ‘Image
and Icon: The New Greek Photography, 1975–1995’ (Macedonian Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1997), which he curated on behalf of the Greek Ministry
of Culture, and its accompanying catalogue represent the first in-depth critical
analysis and evaluation of contemporary Greek photography. He has published
monographs and catalogues as well as many essays and articles on various
photographic subjects in Greece and abroad. Major publications include: A Post-
Classical Landscape: Greek Photography in the 1980s (Hellenic Centre of Photography,
Notes on Contributors xvii
1986); The Invention of Landscape: Greek Landscape & Greek Photography (Camera
Obscura, 1996); Maria Chrousachi: Photographs 1917–1958 (National Gallery of
Greece, 2000); Φωτοφράκτης. Οι φωτογραφίες του Ανδρέα Εμπειρίκου (Agra,
2002); Archaeologies (Thessaloniki Musuem of Photography, 2003); ‘Χαιρετίσματα
από την Άνδρο’: Ταχυδρομικά δελτάρια, 1900–1960 (Kairios Vivliothiki, 2007).
Aliki Tsirgialou has worked at the Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum
since 2001. She took charge of its operation in 2007 by being appointed Curator
in Chief. During this period, she has been involved in archival work and in the
electronic documentation and management of the collection. She has curated
numerous photographic exhibitions, edited the relevant catalogues and published
articles relating to the history of Greek photography. In 2007, she was commissioned
by Melissa Publishing House to edit, in collaboration with Alexandra Moschovi,
the book Greece through Photographs, 160 Years of Visual Testimony and in 2008 she
contributed to the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography published by
Routledge.
Katerina Zacharia is Professor of Classics at Loyola Marymount University, Los

Angeles. She holds a BA in psychology and philosophy from the University of
Athens and MA and PhD degrees in classics from University College London.
Her main interests and publications are in Greek literature, Greek ethnicity,
Greek cinema, classical reception, tourism and heritage studies. She is the author
of Converging Truths: Euripides’ Ion and the Athenian Quest for Self-Definition
(Brill, 2003) and editor and major contributor for Hellenisms: Culture, Identity and
Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Ashgate, 2008).

Acknowledgements
As with other volumes in this series this one emerged out of an international
conference held at the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London.
‘Greek (Hi)stories through the lens: photographs, photographers and their
testimonies’ took place between 8–11 June 2011 and was accompanied by the
exhibition, The Human Price of War: Voula Papaioannou’s phototestimonies of 1940s
Greece, co-organised with the Benaki Museum in Athens. The editors of this
volume, who were also the conference organisers, warmly thank the Centre
for Hellenic Studies for partly funding and hosting the conference. We are
particularly indebted to the then Director of the Centre, Professor Charlotte
Roueché, for her guidance and encouragement. The administrative support of
Pelagia Pais in the Arts and Humanities Research Institute has been invaluable.
We are also grateful to Dr Stavrini Ioannidou, then a graduate student, for her
assistance with the organisation. The accompanying exhibition would not have
materialised but for the generous financial support of the London Hellenic
Society. We are extremely grateful to the Benaki Museum, Athens for allowing
us to exhibit such an extensive selection of Papaioannou’s work for the first time
in the UK. The assistance of Aliki Tsirgialou and Fani Konstantinou, project
managers of the Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, in the organisation
of the exhibition has been priceless. We would also like to thank the graduate
students at the Centre for Hellenic Studies, who volunteered to man the
exhibition desk, and the architectural company Mobile Studio for providing
innovative exhibition solutions to suit the Great Hall in the Strand Campus of
King’s College London.
We are also grateful to John Smedley, our publisher at Ashgate, for his
continuous support. The encouragement and support of Professor Roderick
Beaton in all stages of preparing this volume has been a huge privilege. We
cannot thank him enough for reviewing the volume’s complete manuscript.
Needless to say that any mistakes or omissions are the editors’ responsibility.
We would like to thank all contributors to this volume, whose critical
approaches and meticulous research made it, we hope, a varied and fascinating
forum that will surely initiate discussion on various aspects of photography
of and in Greece, while it will further already-existing discussion on others.
We would like to thank them for enduring our continuous questioning and
editorial intervention which resulted in these chapters being written and
rewritten multiple times. As regards the images included in this volume, we
are indebted to the Benaki Museum for generously allowing contributors to
use photographic material from their exceptionally rich collection. We are
xix
xx Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
additionally grateful to all those foundations, organisations, private collectors

and photographers who have provided image copyright and whose full details
are stated under each image.
1
Introduction

Capturing the Eternal Light:
Photography and Greece,
Photography of Greece
Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou
Shared becomings: Greece and photography from the 1830s to the present
A country founded in 1830, modern Greece grew hand in hand with photographic
modernity. Following the War of Independence, stability in the albeit limited
geographical area that was modern Greece enabled and facilitated visits to the
new state, and inevitably made it the object of photographic depictions. Relative
stability, civic order, and intensified contacts with the West also fostered the
conditions for Greeks to turn towards the new medium. Thus, a discussion of
Greece and photography seems essentially to bifurcate into two distinct topics:
photography in and of Greece, and Greek photography.1 Photography in and of
Greece emphasises the photographic object – Greece as a material reality and as
virtual locus, constructed through the lens. Greek photography, on the other hand,
focuses on the subjects who take the photographs, the auteurs of photographic
discourses, grouped together by nationality, a grouping which – as in notions
of ‘Greek’ literature, painting and architecture – presents its own challenges.
While the two topics can be separated in theory, they are practically very closely
interconnected.
The photographic coverage of ancient Greek material culture was the primary
reason for European and North American photographers to visit the newly-
founded Greek state in the late 1830s. The first to photograph the Acropolis in
October 1839 was the Canadian Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, while the
Frenchman Joseph-Phillibert Girault de Prangey photographed the Propylaea
1
This bifurcation is also reflected in the title of a recent volume, Greek Photography and
Photography in Greece (ed. I. Papaioannou, Athens 2013), which collects a number of important items
of Greek scholarship on this topic.
From Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities, eds Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis
and Eleni Papargyriou. Copyright © 2015 by the Centre for Hellenic Studies. Published by Ashgate
Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.
3
4 Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities
and the Parthenon as early as 1842.2 These early photographers focused on

topography, architecture and materiality. Images such as those by de Prangey,
but also images by William James Stillman and Félix Bonfils, with their close
focus on stone relics, fetishised their texture, suitably (and necessarily) rendered
in black and white. Most commercial photographers reproduced a stereotypical
image of classical antiquities, portrayed in splendid isolation, responding thus to
the preconceptions of their Western customers. Early photographers were equally
captivated by ‘Greek light’, primarily conceived as a metaphor for the intellectual

endowment of ancient culture to the Western world. Refracted on the pale
surface of ruins, the light of Greece became a topos, an identifiable trademark,
and, eventually, a commodity. Through their emphasis on ancient architecture and
the omission, as much as possible, of post-classical ruins and modern materiality,
these photographs achieved a mediation of modern Greece through antiquity.
Photographic projects on Greece resulted in a kind of colonial objectification of
Greece and its representation as a locus of ruins bereft of human presence, not as
a fast-changing country, partaking in modernity.
However, one should note that looking at ancient Greek material culture on the
daguerreotype or an early albumen print was also a modern experience for viewers.
Looking at ancient relics on these early photographs (as opposed to looking at
them in painted images) informed viewers of the complexities of the monument’s
being there in the present; the monuments became part of the contemporary
landscape. The photographic medium established a connection between viewers
and the ancient world not only by showcasing the duration of ancient relics, but
also by displaying the perenniality of the gaze that looked at them. By providing
audiences with the likeness of ancient sites, a likeness more exact than that of
painting, photographers enhanced the sensorial experience of interacting with the
monuments.3
It is only recently that photographic coverage of ancient Greek material
culture began to be critically examined, and the authority of the photograph as
truthful, uncontestable and uncomplicated documentation challenged. The volume
Antiquity and Photography (Lyons et al. 2005), which examines the photography
of archaeological sites across the Mediterranean, succeeds in problematising the
uses of the camera in the construction of the ancient Greek world. Theorising
the link between photography and antiquity has been furthered by a number of
scholars, including Bohrer (2011), Downing (2006), and Hamilakis.4 These works
have systematically inscribed the photography of ancient Greek material culture
2
Lotbinière’s daguerreotypes have not survived except in aquatints (see Tsirgialou and Bohrer,
this volume). For a selection of de Prangey’s images, see Lyons et al. 2005: 75–86.
3
On antiquity and painting just before the invention of photography, see Lyons et al. 2005:
112–28.
4
Hamilakis 2001, 2008, 2009a, 2009b; Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2013; Hamilakis et al. 2009; see
also Hamilakis and Ifantidis, this volume.
Capturing the Eternal Light 5
within a metatheoretical reflection that closely observes the mechanisms by which

the question ‘how is antiquity constructed’ becomes visually configured.5
The first use of a daguerreotyping device by Greeks is reported in 1848
(Xanthakis 1994: 40),6 nine years after the invention of photography and
after a number of European and North American photographers had already
monumentalised Greece through the lens. Thus, Greek photography inevitably
developed on the pattern of foreign photographic narratives on Greek themes. Early
Greek photographic practice shaped itself in the light of Western conceptions of

the country, with the first Greek photographers conforming to the demands of the
Western market. Their images of Greece, with some exceptions, give emphasis to
ancient material culture (see Stathatos 2013: 127 and this volume) and refrained
from depicting their contemporary surroundings. Conforming to Western
photographic stereotypes, they reproduced a colonial gaze upon the country that
disregarded its modern face in favour of its ancient relics (Panayotopoulos 2009).
While the first few decades of photographing Greece focused primarily on
ancient material culture, one detects a shift towards the Greek landscape, already
visible from the 1870s, which nevertheless gained considerable prominence in
the twentieth century. This shift was no less ideological. It entailed a process of
monumentalising the landscape, similar to that which had taken place as regards
ancient sites. Topography, light conditions, the sky and the sea would become
important points of identification, produced by the photographic lens. That
landscape was conceived as eternal and timeless, in its continuous existence since
ancient times. At the same time, interest in the Greek landscape culminated in
the understanding that the gaze upon it created a link with the ancient world: it
was the same landscape one looked at (photographers would again try to leave
out traces of modern life) since ancient times. Frédéric Boissonnas, the Swiss
photographer who engaged in a systematic photographic cartography of Greece
between 1903 and 1933, shot an impressive number of landscape photographs,
taken in all corners of the country. The landscape, which features endless qualities
of light, was thought to reflect continuity from the ancient to the present day.7
Boissonnas’s case is seminal in highlighting a phenomenon that dominates
photography in Greece in the twentieth century: its systematic exploitation
by the state. As Irini Boudouri has shown (2003), in addition to being an
adept craftsman, Boissonnas was a nifty businessman, who persuaded the
Greek state authorities that his photographs would enhance the country’s
5
For a bibliography on photography in Greece in the nineteenth century, see Hamilakis and
Szegedy-Maszak (2001).
6
Karali maintains that the French daguerreotypist Villeroy who was in Greece in 1841–43
failed to establish his own workshop despite being supported by Queen Amalia, who was an early
photo-enthusiast (Karali 2012: 90–95).
7
An avenue for further exploration would be considering ways in which the photographic
monumentalisation of landscape contributed to its heightened symbolisation by the literary ‘generation
of the 1930s’, notably by George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis.
political, commercial and touristic image abroad. Another photographer who

undertook state commissions in the early part of the twentieth century was Elli
Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, widely known as Nelly, or ‘Nelly’s’ (henceforth Nelly).
As John Stathatos and Katerina Zacharia explain in this volume, since the late
1920s Nelly was commissioned by the Greek state to create images that were
ideologically charged – these were intended to propagate a highly manipulated
image of the country abroad. After World War II (henceforth WWII), eminent
photographers such as Kostas Balafas and Nikos Harissiadis were employed by

the newly-founded State Electricity Company to document the works that would
transform Greece into a modern country (Kassianou 2013a). The employment
of photographers to capture seminal moments in modernising the state makes
clear that photography was recognised as a powerful means of influencing
public opinion, and disseminating state propaganda. Photography was conceived
as a means of compiling visual archives which would catalogue and index the
achievements of the state, and state authorities did not fail to use this ability in
their own interest.
While it was widely used for a host of purposes, photography in Greece was
not taken seriously as an art form until the late 1970s, when the foundation of the
Athens Photography Centre and the publication of the journal Photography (1977)
would try to carve out some dedicated space for it in the art world. In that spirit,
the first attempts to historicise Greek photography also emerged. Alkis Xanthakis’s
History of Greek Photography (first published 1981) provides a first systematic
charting. Being an amateur historian, Xanthakis follows an evolutionary pattern
of technological progression, covering – at least in the first editions of the book
– the period 1839–1960.8 His account stops at the peak of Greek photographic
modernity, showcased in the Hellenocentric work of Takis Tloupas and Dimitris
Harissiadis. Xanthakis’s book, a pioneering work for its time, is now regarded as
dated, mainly due to its lack of theoretical orientation.
Contributions towards a history of Greek photography have been made, albeit
in a piecemeal fashion, by a number of exhibition catalogues, prefaces to illustrated
volumes, edited volumes and collections of essays. John Stathatos’s Image and
Idol (1997), an exhibition catalogue containing a lucid essay, as well as Aspects of
Greek Photography, the catalogue accompanying the 1998 exhibition of Greek
photography in Nice, organised by the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, are
such examples. The annual conference series organised by John Stathatos on the
island of Kythera and the ensuing volumes of papers have offered a consistent
forum for the general discussion, historicisation and theoretical appropriation of
Greek photography. A recent anthology of essays edited by Iraklis Papaioannou
(2013) on Greek photography and photography of Greece is a useful tool for
anyone wishing to gain an overview of Greek scholarship on Greek photography.
An important contribution to photography of and in Cyprus is the recent volume
Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity (Wells et al. 2014): this is a volume
8
In 2008 Xanthakis issued a revised version of the history to include a discussion of the 1960s.
with strong theoretical underpinnings, from the analysis of the postcolonial gaze
to the examination of gendered perceptions of the island.
The last thirty years in Greek photography have been covered by Kostas
Ioannidis’s Contemporary Greek Photography: A Century in Thirty Years (2008).
Ioannidis’s important book is not strictly a history of the recent period, but in view
of such a gap, it undoubtedly serves as one. The book explicitly converses with John
Stathatos’s Image and Idol, assuming the same starting point in the mid-1970s.
Ioannidis does not provide any historical landmarks for this choice of periodisation
and refrains from using history as an interpretive tool for photography. He works
within the limits of the genre and discusses developments in style and subject as
inclined by the medium itself and professed by photographers. His book remains
to date the only systematic and theoretically informed attempt to chart was has
been termed ‘New Greek Photography’.
A fully comprehensive and theoretically informed social history of Greek
photography remains to be written. While the present volume is not a history of
Greek photography or of photography in Greece, it offers theoretical and critical
viewpoints that could potentially inform such a project. We hope that this volume
will point to research areas and theoretical concepts that should shape the aims,
scope and remit of such a history. A new and reliable history of Greek photography
needs to be defined by photographic objects as well as photographic discourses.
Alexandra Moschovi’s chapter in this volume suggests a fruitful pattern on which
this history could be designed.
By choosing to discuss Greece as the stage and the object of photographic
action, we do not intend to promote an essentialist or an exceptionalist view.
It is not our aim to highlight differences that supposedly make Greece a unique
photographic locus. We rather propose to position Greece as an example within
a continuum of photographic discourses that all centre around modernity,
materiality and narrativity. However, we do not wish to underestimate the
specific conditions that underpin this example either. The fact that, as a new
country, Greece defined itself partly through its photographic representations is
certainly an idea that should be further explored. The western and the indigenous
interest in material culture, folklore and tourism produced multi-faceted and
often contradictory narratives that intertwine to tell a fascinating story that is
often as complex as it is subjective and calculated.
Ontologies of the photographic field: theorising photography
As we intimated above, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Bonhomme and Derrida
1996; Hamilakis et al. 2009; Moschovi 2010, 2013; Petsini 2013), most work on
the photography of and in Greece to date has avoided explicit theorisation and
reflection on its ontological, epistemological and political work and impact. One
of the aims of this volume is to fill this lacuna and encourage further thinking on
the matter. But how does one write a theory of photography, given its multiplicity
of forms, from the singular and thus not reproducible glass cases of daguerreotypes
to the ‘ocean’ of free-floating, endlessly reproduced and modified digital imagery
that surrounds us in the early twenty-first century? And how about the diversity of
its contexts and registers, from the documentary photograph depicting a historical
landmark or an archaeological site, to portraiture, to the journalistic image, to a
police mugshot, the CCTV image, the tourist snapshot, and to the creative and
artistic photograph? And what is it that we are going to theorise and reflect on?
The photographic product, the thing and its function and role, or the photographic
process – that is, the practice itself (cf. Kriebel 2007: 5)? Or is it not better to
think, not of photographic things and technological apparatuses, but of the ‘event’
of photography, as Ariella Azoulay (2012) has recently proposed? Despite this
difficulty, the attempt to make sense of the miracle of photography started from the
moment of its initial inception, if not before (cf. Batchen 1997). It is not accidental
that philosophers have been, since antiquity, deeply immersed in optics, and in the
various technical apparatuses which lie at the interface between vision, image and
the rendering of the world. This is an effort that continues unabated to the present
day, as articles and books on the matter testify.9
One way out of this difficulty is to shift the discussion to a broader domain, and
think instead of the photographic field. As a space, this field includes technologies,
processes, and various sentient and not sentient agents and apparatuses, in diverse
forms and shapes: the camera, the photographer, chemicals and materials, the
after-image, the photographed person, object, thing or landscape, light, the field
of vision in all its synaesthetic and multi-sensorial dimensions, and the emotive,
mnemonic, and political effects that photographic acts, events and outcomes
generate (cf. Hamilakis 2013).
In the various canonical attempts to theorise this field, certain elements
and components of it have been prioritised (and others downplayed), at specific
moments in time. For example, if we are to consider Fox Talbot’s foundational
text, The Pencil of Nature, published between 1844 and 1846 as a photo-theoretical
treatise, we will note the insistence on the agency of light and ‘nature’. Here is the
opening sentence of the book:
The little work now presented to the Public is the first attempt to publish a series of plates or
pictures wholly executed by the new art of Photogenic Drawing without any aid whatever from
the artist’s pencil.
Talbot even thought it necessary to introduce inserts in the various facsimiles with
a reminder printed on them: ‘Notice to the Reader: The plates of the present work
9
For some recent examples, see Azoulay 2008, 2012; Batchen 1997, 2004, 2011; Behdad and
Gartlan 2013; Bleyen 2012; Cadava 1997; Derrida 2010; Downing 2006; Edwards 2001; Elkins 2007;
Long et al. 2009; Olin 2012; Osborne 2003; Pinney and Petterson 2003; Ritchin 2009; see also the
recently launched journals Philosophy of Photography, and Photographies – note the plural.
are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the
artist’s pencil’ (Talbot 1844: n.p.).
These rhetorical pronouncements may be taken to denote an insistence, even
an anxiety to stress the technological and thus scientific and objective nature of
the then new apparatus and technology, echoing at the same time the well-known
rivalry between painting and photography which was raging at that time. They
could be also read as a denigration of the agency of the photographer, which, as we
know, has been instrumental in shaping the photographic after-images, well before
the age of digital manipulation and the photo-shop (cf. Fineman 2012). As such,
they speak to scholarly debates as well as public perceptions, still widespread to
the present day, on the realistic authority, testimonial power and evidential effect
of the photographic image, its veracity, its ability to reveal the truth. But Talbot’s
statements can be also read differently, as has been done by Azoulay (2012): as an
attempt to foreground the agency of other factors beyond the photographer, and as
an early attempt to point to the transformative power of a photographic situation,
of a photographic event.
More recent attempts at theorisation, however, have insisted on the agency
and authority of the photographer either as an artist (articulating thus a
formalist, and often de-historicised art-historical discourse), or as cultural
producer. The conceptualisation of photography as cultural production, often
inspired by Marxism, took the discussion further into a rather fruitful terrain,
reflecting on photographic after-images as material, cultural commodities
within a visual economy and within a regime of capitalist mass-production and
reproducibility. Here the inspiring thought of Walter Benjamin (2008), and
(less so) of Siegfried Kracauer (1993), have been instrumental. These approaches
did not only foreground the role of photography in the spectacular economy of
capitalism, but pointed also to its central position in the surveillance and archival
attempts of the state (e.g. Poole 1997; Tagg 1988; Sekula 1981, 1992). Often,
such approaches were combined with semiotic or psycho-analytical perspectives,
as in the pioneering and influential (at least within the British context) work of
Burgin (e.g. Burgin 1982).
As other critics (e.g. Batchen 1997) have noted, however, despite the
productive effects of these theoretical reflections, the photographic acts
themselves but also the things, the photographs and their materiality, were
overshadowed. Both photographic processes and photographic after-images
were often seen as tools and devices to be manipulated by the state, by the
photographer and by capitalism, depriving them thus of their own agency. It
is partially to the need to foreground the role of photographs themselves that
accounts for the success of Barthes’s reflections in his Camera Lucida (1981). This
is perhaps the most cited theoretical text since its publication, discussed also by
several contributors in this volume. In sharp contrast to his earlier, semiotic-
sociological writings, in Camera Lucida Barthes chose a personal, reflective
tone, merging his thoughts on memory, death and familial attachments with
broader concerns on the ontology and epistemology of photography. While the
most popular interpretative scheme in Barthes’s book proved to be his binarism

between the studium and the punctum (the theme and the informational content
of the photograph on the one hand, and its affective impact, on the other), it is
increasingly realised that the book’s fundamental value lies elsewhere. ‘Odd that
no one has thought of the disturbance (to civilisation) which this new action
causes’, notes Barthes (1981: 12). It becomes clear in Camera Lucida that the
disturbance the author has in mind is one of temporal nature: photographic
objects are multi-temporal things, and they condense different times as

co-existence rather than succession; for example, the having-being-there of the
time when the photo was taken, and the here-and-now of us viewing it, and often
several other times in between. This temporal-ontological work of photography
is something that was recognised (but not necessarily articulated as such) from
early on, even since Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, when, for example, the ability
of photography to record the decay and the patina in buildings was noted.
Batchen thus notes that with photographs, ‘[W ]hat we have is a new space
category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an
illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then’ (1997: 193).
And later, ‘[A]ccording to Barthes, then, the reality offered by the photograph
is not that of truth-to-appearance but rather of truth-to-presence, a matter of
being (of something’s irrefutable place in space/time) rather than resemblance’
(1997: 193; cf. also Batchen 2011).
These reflections lead to two important insights: the first is that the mnemonic
work of photography, so prominent in Barthes and in many other theoreticians, is
not of a representational or an indexical nature, as is often assumed. Photographs
do not remind us of the past by resembling or representing some material reality,
now lost. They are rather material and mnemonic traces of the things, events,
instances and sensorial occasions experienced. They are traces, not in the sense
of an imprint, but in the sense of a material remnant, of a relic. It is as if the
technological apparatus of photography had managed to extract a material
fragment from the ‘flesh’ of the world, and preserve it for posterity.
Photographs command sensorial attention, and they fill the field of vision
by force (Barthes 1981: 91), making demands on their viewer and handler. Their
mnemonic work often needs multi-sensorial practices in order to be activated, such
as embellishing, decorating, intense handling and modification (cf. Batchen 2004).
This is active remembering and forgetting, not passive recollection; things, people,
experiences are not recalled, but produced anew.
The spectral presence of photographs, however, releases us ‘from the passage of
time. And the photographs can also do this – they act like barriers or weirs which
stem the flow’, as the literary author W.G. Sebald has put it (Schwartz 2007:
42). This ‘releasing from the passage of time’ can be also read as a release from
the temporal ontology of western modernity, of time as linearity, progression, as
teleological narrative, time-as-passage and as irreversible flow. This is the second
important insight: the temporal work that photographs themselves engender,
their multi-temporal nature, their creative anachronism.
Our modest proposal here thus is to embrace that relatively neglected insight
from Camera Lucida and instead of ‘disturbance’, to consider it as an opportunity
which can connect discussions on photography with contemporary ontological
debates on diverse modes of temporal and historical understanding, beyond
linearity, progressivism and teleology – to embrace, in other words, photographs as
material and mnenomic traces but also as multi-temporal things that can unleash
the liberating potential and agency of diverse times.
But talk of liberating agency brings us back to the political dimension of

photography, neglected in Camera Lucida but foregrounded in the range of other
Marxist works mentioned above. These early insights will need to be combined with
more recent, politically potent and theoretically inspiring work. An example are the
studies by Azoulay (2008, 2012) which draw on the author’s experiences from Israel
and the material and visual dimensions of the occupation of Palestine, proposing
that we should move – for a moment at least – beyond photographs themselves,
even beyond the act of photographing, and consider instead the photographic event
(irrespective of whether it results in photographs or not), and the contract that it
potentially creates between the photographer and the photographed person, object
or situation. What do photographed people expect of photography? What is the
social and political responsibility bestowed upon the photographer? What are the
prospective memories, the anticipated and unanticipated outcomes, and the political
tensions, engendered and activated at any photographic event and situation?
One potentially productive way of conceptualising the photographic field is
to think of photography through the concept of sensorial assemblages (Hamilakis
2013): this Deleuze-inspired concept denotes the heterogeneous and contingent
co-presence of diverse entities, bodies, things, landscapes and environments,
memories and affects, where the sensorial impact of one entity accentuates the
sensorial effect of another, and of the assemblage as a whole. Each photographic
event, seen as a sensorial assemblage, includes a range of such entities: the camera,
the photographer, the person, thing or landscape to be photographed, the light and
the atmosphere, the surrounding props, the on-lookers, the photographic memories
that are activated prior to taking a photograph (as for example, when a photograph
of a monument such as the Athenian Acropolis cites the standardised photographic
canon, established since the nineteenth century). Such a sensorial assemblage may
or may not produce other material entities, such as after-images, which may or may
not become territorialised and monumentalised as photographic archival entities.
Needless to say, the agency and sensorial impact of some entities such as lighting
conditions or mnemonic recollections, for example, would have a transformative
effect on the assemblage as a whole and on any resulted material entities.
Such an approach recognises the agency of diverse elements implicated in the
photographic field, and embraces the insights gained by the recent ‘material turn’
on photography (e.g. Edwards 2001, 2009; Edwards and Hart 2004), while at the
same time foregrounding the dialectic between materiality and immateriality,
and the importance of sensorial and affective flows amongst the different agents
(cf. Hamilakis 2013). At the same time, it invites us to consider all different
contexts and spaces in which photographic events take place, mundane as well
as more unusual, beyond the museum, the gallery and the archive. It also invites
us to produce and stage diverse photographic-sensorial assemblages, not only by
restoring dispersed and archival photography back to its original contexts, but
also by staging performances as photo-ethnographic installations (cf. Castañeda
2009), eliciting thus affective, mnemonic and political responses from viewing
and participating audiences.
Overview of the volume
The aim of this volume has been to examine larger theoretical undercurrents that
allow for a broader, critical discussion of Greek and Greece-related photography.
In this spirit, the 16 chapters are organised around four thematic sections.
Part I, Imag(in)ing the Nation, works within the premise that the
photographic lens does not depict what is there, but rather produces it.
Photography contributed to the imag(in)ing of the new country by providing
national narratives: the continuity with the ancient world, the search for a
modern identity, the slow and painstaking processes of state making and
nation building. Within this framework, it is often the photographers diverting
from market norms and preconceived visual patterns, such as William James
Stillman and Pascal Sébah, who have broken new ground. But, as many of
the contributors to Part I claim, we cannot understand their novelty unless we
compare them to the majority of canonical photographers who sought to follow
well-trodden paths in pursuing market demands.
One of the volume’s purposes is to highlight the narrative capacity of the
photographic medium in all its different manifestations. It is this capacity that
takes centre stage in Part II, Photographic Narratives, Alternative Histories. As
events and things that oscillate between craft and fiction, photographs narrate
not just by means of their visual content, but also by means of the conditions
in which they were conceived, created and consumed. Thus, Part II scrutinises
ways in which photographic narratives are constructed, from ways in which they
convey ideology to ways in which they manifest time and memory. Photography
has been employed as a suitable narrative tool by Greek poets and novelists;
the readings prompted by the interaction of the textual and the visual are both
exciting and revealing.
Until recently, historical research worldwide seemed to be still favouring written
sources to a large extent (Burke 2001: 9–19). Similarly, in Greece, photographs do
not frequently become the central focus of historians’ attention; when they do,
their content is conventionally taken at face value, used as an illustration to back
a specific argument. There has been no systematic attempt to inquire into factors
such as photographic agency, either of the photographer or of the photograph
itself, or of the entanglement of photography with state and other authorities
and apparatuses, which make it a subjective account rather than an uncontestable
conveyor of ‘truth’.10 Chapters in Part III of this volume, Photographic Matter-

realities: Photography as Propaganda, problematise uses of the photograph in
historical research on Greece, emphasising especially the political deployment
of photography and its propagandist role. They expand the discussion into the
photographic archive as a compendium of visual narratives; and they examine
the agency behind its compilation and its dissemination strategies, as well as the
conditions under which it is expected to be consumed.
Discussions of photography in and of Greece and Greek photography

rarely include vernacular photography, a term recently developed to designate
photography which is intended for private use. Vernacular photography is not to be
equated with amateur photography. Its semiotic range places it within the personal
archive, at the heart of local history, and as an aid to the workings of memory.
Photographs are treasured as keepsakes, exhibited on mantelpieces and preserved
in albums accompanied by annotations. They are kept close to the body in amulets,
as they are frequently believed to bear traces of beloved bodies themselves. The
chapters that make up Part IV of this volume, Photographic Ethnographies: The
Dispersal of Photographic Objects, work with these notions, discussing cases in which
photography and the materiality of photographs become important for individuals
and communities alike.
The five chapters in Part I present, discuss and contextualise photographic
images of modern Greece and their attendant imageries. John Stathatos maintains
that, during the latter part of the long nineteenth century and up to the turbulent
1940s, ideological considerations and political exigencies underpinned the pivotal
role ascribed to photography as provider of ‘a record, a mirror, and a model’ for
society. For her part, Alexandra Moschovi demonstrates how, in the latter half of
the short twentieth century, photography came to challenge this model of nation-
building, particularly as regards preconceived and uniform images of national
identity. Underpinning both chapters is the concept of identity-construction as the
product of an ideological but also of an iconical process; or, as the author of one of
the first pieces in Greek on ‘photography’ put it, a process wherein ‘the power of the
mind’ is substituted by that of ‘the [photographic] matter’ (Anonymous 1865: 14).
The remaining three chapters of Part I focus on early photographic
representations of modern Greece, primarily by foreign travellers, through the
time-honoured prism of classical monuments and relics; and all three bring to
the forefront the interrelated issue of the reception and dissemination of the
visual record. Aliki Tsirgialou offers a comprehensive overview of nineteenth-
century photography of Greece, highlighting its main themes and tracing the
reasons behind this thematic preference on the photographers’ part. Tsirgialou
contends that obsession with certain motifs should, to a certain extent, be
traced back to the pre-photographic era and patterns suggested by tourist
guides. Focusing on William James Stillman’s 1870 photographic portfolio The
10
Exceptions include Mahaira (1987) and Vervenioti (2009). For a discussion of the uses of
photographs in Greek historical research, see Kassianou (2013b).
Acropolis of Athens, Frederick N. Bohrer dissects the interdependent factual

and subjective functions of the photographic act, and proposes that Stillman’s
viewing and visual representation of the Acropolis was in the mould of Freud’s
cryptic exclamation recalled in his letter to the art historian Romain Rolland
in 1936, 30 or so years after viewing the Acropolis for the first time: ‘So all
this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!’ (cited in Steinberger 1997).
Heather Grossman explores the ideological function of Paschal Sébah’s early
1870s Athenian oeuvre, in which he employed varying visual strategies of

code-switching. Founder of the eponymous Istanbul photographic firm, which
inter alia was commissioned by the Ottoman government to produce a large
photographic album entitled Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873, Sébah
targeted his Athenian photographs at Greek elites in the Ottoman capital, who
perceived the Greek kingdom as a modern European state with a burgeoning
cosmopolitan capital.
In the opening chapter of Part II, Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis
‘decapitate’ the visual monumentalising of the Acropolis as implicitly presented
in Stillman’s portfolio, as well as in the photographic record upon which the
Victorian painter Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema based his output of Greco-Roman
themes (Tomlinson 1991). Instead, they propose an alternative narrative of
viewing-experiencing (and constructing) through photographic means: not of
the single universal Acropolis but of the various multifarious Acropolises, which
allow for the activation of a multi-sensorial, tactile and mostly kinaesthetic
visuality. The theme of the visual rhetoric of the photographic record is taken
up by Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakitou. Basing their analysis on Rufus
Byam Richardson’s Greece Through the Stereoscope (1907), a work that has hitherto
been neglected, they scrutinise ‘stereomania’s’ most crucial element, that is space,
and argue that this proto-3D environment offers viewers a peculiar sense of
anxiety and timeless visuality.
The narrative function of photographs, as well as the concept of timeless
visuality, is more explicitly brought out in the last two chapters of Part II, which
underscore the engagement of literary studies with photographic theories
of representation. Theodoros Chiotis examines the double-edged function
of George Seferis’s photographs by way of which time is conceptualised as a
metaphor of subjectivity and as an expression of duration. Like his contemporary,
the surrealist Andreas Embirikos, for whom the photographic act was like
keeping diaries on film (Yatromanolakis 2001: 54–5), Seferis the photographer,
the author maintains, seeks to assemble a personal experience of time that is
marked by a multitude of temporalities. For her part, Eleni Papargyriou
showcases a number of post-1980 literary photo-books set in an urban milieu,
from Omonoia Square in central Athens to Los Angeles. As she points out, these
symbiotic occurrences of texts and photographs, in which the former become
more than captions to the latter and the latter more than illustrations to the
former, expose a visual and textual hybridity that surpasses traditional notions of
fictionality and historicity.
George Giannakopoulos, in the opening chapter of Part III, offers an

account of Arnold Toynbee’s photographic archive on Anatolia in 1921, at the
height of the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor. By juxtaposing the historian’s
visual to the written record, he unearths Toynbee’s thinking as regards his
scholarly engagements with Greece and his experiences at the Anatolian
warfront as an embedded journalist. A more overt function of the employment of
the photographic record as propaganda is explored in the other two chapters of
Part III. In her comprehensive account of Nelly’s iconography of Greece,

Katerina Zacharia discusses the photographer’s work of the 1930s and her
relation(s) with the dictatorial regime of Ioannis Metaxas. Problematising
the tension between makers and subjects of heritage formation, she argues
that in Nelly’s oeuvre the political context of nationalist iconography is de-
emphasised or downright obliterated. Drawing on the photographic exhibits at
the military museum of the Battle of Sarandaporo, one of many such propaganda
sites established during the junta years (1967–74), Eleni Kouki theorises the
social meaning of war photographs. She shows how, in this instance, shifts
in the reception of these photos were determined through a series of complex
ideological and cultural processes.
With their anthropological focus, the four chapters of Part IV theorise further
the multiple contexts of the inception and dissemination of the photographic
record, focusing inter alia on ways by which the photographic record inscribes
itself in collective memory. Margaret E. Kenna revisits the photographs she
herself took on the island of Anafi and among island migrants in Athens, from
the 1960s onwards. This is not a voyage down memory lane, but an attempt
to look at the photographic record as a medium of exchange between the
photographer and her interlocutors. Subjected to processes of re-interrogation
and reflexive introspection, the photographic past gains a new ‘here and now-
ness’. In the same vein, Elena Mamoulaki shows how both at the time of its
production and later, the photographic record can play a pivotal role in processes
of social interaction. Both as evidence of one’s survival at the time and nowadays
as mementoes in a local photography shop, she argues, photographs of civil-
war political exiles and their hosts on the island of Ikaria have shaped people’s
historical consciousness and contributed to a shared sense of collective memory.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in western highland Crete, the chapter
by Konstantinos Kalantzis also examines people’s responses to visual
representations that depict them. Treating photography as a platform that
encapsulates diverse dynamics as well as a sphere that is endlessly re-signified
through the social, he argues that Sphakian approaches to the visual can only be
understood by employing a model of ‘cyclical synergy’, one which unearths the
complex interactions and hierarchies at play in the encounter between cultural
producers and rural subjects. Penelope Papailias enquires into photographic
discourses that have emerged from photographic albums compiled by Albanian
and Bulgarian migrants in Greece. After discussing the theoretical complexities
of the personal album, Papailias effectively highlights the visual vocabulary
by means of which the photographers have coded their placement in the host
country and their perceptions of the country itself.
In the Afterword, Ludmilla Jordanova reflects on the themes offered
in this volume from the point of view of a historian who has not actively
engaged with the country, but has formed an opinion on it mostly through its
visual representations. By highlighting examples of books on Greece, such as
Arnold Wycombe Gomme’s Greece (1945), Jordanova ponders the concept of
photographic illustration and its usefulness. She concludes that Greece and
photography should go beyond the concept of illustration, with photography
being a decisive tool that fashioned the new country and its citizens’s perception
of themselves from the 1830s onwards.
Agendas for the future
We contend that the chapters in this volume have the potential to ignite debate
and spearhead further research on exciting but hitherto unexplored questions and
themes, in the broader field of photography in and of Greece. We further hope
that, with Greece being such a fascinating and multifaceted case-study, these
debates and research outcomes will fertilise the global discussion on the theory,
aesthetics and politics of the photographic field. Nevertheless, we are fully aware
that there are several other themes that have not been addressed in this book, and
that, regarding those which have been addressed, much in-depth work still needs
to be done.
Future research must encourage more historians to examine photographs
as important research material in its own right, rather than as illustrations of
historical arguments or iconographic proofs of historical facts. Archaeologists can
be expected to reflect more deeply on their routine use of photography in their
work, and examine the visual narratives they produce and the aesthetic, social
and political effects they engender. Scholars in a variety of disciplines ought to
make photographic archives a central research concern, rather than regard them
simply as a repository of historical, ethnographic, literary, archaeological or other
information. Instead, they deserve to be treated as assemblages of sensorial and
material history which often have their own biography, internal logic and aesthetic-
cum-social and political impact (cf. Stoller 2010). The history of photography in
and of Greece needs to move beyond the paradigm of a technological/progressivist
narrative and of the individual photographer-‘auteur’, to embrace a socially and
politically sensitive understanding of the entanglement of the photographic field
with colonial and national imaginings, acknowledging also the agency of the state
and other social actors. We should therefore expect to see more acts of photographic
restitution, and the staging of photo-ethnographic installations: in other words,
we hope that major archives, organisations, and other cultural institutions will
produce fewer coffee-table photographic books for elite consumption, and strive
instead to bring archival photographic material to the communities that had been
the subjects of such photographs or are associated with it in some way. This will
provide important occasions for public, individual and collective reflection on
time, memory, and experience, and will undoubtedly engender further research
and thinking on the public work of photography, and the meaning and impact of
the photographic phenomenon.
Finally, contemporary photographic production and consumption are in
urgent need for further theorisation and debate. Such discussion should include
digital photography, a subject only incidentally touched upon in this volume.

Today, especially with the omnipresence of mobile phone cameras, everybody is
a photographer and many millions of photographs are produced and circulated
every day. How does this change the production, circulation and consumption
of photographs (cf. Ritchin 2009)? While we have explored, to some extent,
uses of photographs in different communities, it remains to be examined how
photography of and in Greece fares in social networks. On sites such as Facebook,
Twitter or Instagram, theorists and historians of Greek photography alike should
primarily inquire into complexities of consumption: how do photographs circulate
and how does their display create networks? Social networks are places where users
have the opportunity to comment directly on photographs. Do these comments
form part of the images’ content? Are they to be perceived as extended or indeed
idiosyncratic captions?
More generally, what kind of photographic narratives are being produced
today, and how has the photographic field reacted to the rapid changes that
are under way in Greece, in the early twenty-first century? How do the various
migrant communities, for example, relate to the photographic field? Has
an emerging multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Greek society produced new
photographic narratives, and novel and culturally diverse approaches to the
matter, and if so, how have these dealt with the established national discourses?
We hope to have shown in this book that, far from being a peripheral matter or
the pastime of a few theorists and some eccentric amateurs, the photographic
field is central to the constitution and experience of social and cultural life today,
and it deserves thorough scholarly and public attention. We look forward to the
exciting developments that lie ahead.
References
Anonymous (1865), ‘Φωτογραφία’, Pandora XVI/361: 13–14.

Azoulay, A. (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books.
Azoulay, A. (2012), Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, translated
by L. Bethlehem, London: Verso.
Barthes, R. (1981[1980]), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by
R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang.
Batchen, G. (1997), Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Batchen, G. (2004), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Amsterdam and

New York: Van Gogh Museum and Princeton Architectural Press.
Batchen, G. (2011), Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera
Lucida, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Behdad, A. and Gartlan, L. (2013), Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on
Colonial Representation, Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute.
Benjamin, W. (2008 [1935–36]), The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press.
Bleyen, M. (ed.) (2012), Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to
Photography Theory, Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Bohrer, F. (2011), Photography and Archaeology, London: Reaktion.
Bonhomme, J.-F. and Derrida, J. (1996), Αθήνα. Στη Σκιά της Ακρόπολης/Athènes.
À L’Ombre de L’Aropole, bilingual edition: Greek translation by V. Bitsoris,
Athens: Olkos.
Boudouri, I. (2003), ‘Φωτογραφία και εξωτερική πολιτική (1905–1922): η συμβολή
της οικογένειας Boissonnas’, in J. Stathatos (ed.), 1o Συνέδριο για την Ιστορία
της Ελληνικής Φωτογραφίας, Thessaloniki, Museum of Photography/Kythera
Photographic Encounters, 47–59.
Burke, P. (2001), Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, Ithaca
NY: Cornell University Press.
Cadava, E. (1997), Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Castañeda, Q. (2009), ‘The “Past” as Transcultural Space: Using Ethnographic
Installation in the Study of Archaeology’, in Y. Hamilakis and
A. Anagnostopoulos (eds), Archaeological Ethnographies, London: Manney,
262–82 (Public Archaeology 8(2/3)).
Derrida, J. (2010), Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, edited
by G. Richter, translated by J. Fort, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Downing, E. (2006), After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and
the Tradition of Bildung, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Edwards, E. (2001), Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums,
Oxford: Berg.
Edwards, E. (2009), ‘Thinking Photography beyond the Visual?’, in J.J. Long,
A. Noble and E. Welch (eds), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, London:
Routledge, 31–48.
Edwards, E. and J. Hart (2004), ‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects’, in E. Edwards
and J. Hart (eds), Photographs, Objects, Histories, London: Routledge, 1–15.
Elkins, J. (ed.) (2007), Photography Theory, New York and London, Routledge.
Elkins, J. (2011), What Photography Is, New York and London: Routledge.
Fox Talbot, W.H. (1844), The Pencil of Nature, London: Longman, Brown, Green,
and Longmans.
Hamilakis, Y. (2001), ‘Monumental Visions: Bonfils, Classical Antiquity and

Nineteenth-century Athenian Society’, History of Photography 25(1): 5–12 and
23–43.
Hamilakis, Y. (2007), The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National
Imagination in Greece, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hamilakis, Y. (2008), ‘Monumentalising Place: Archaeologists, Photographers,
and the Athenian Acropolis from the Eighteenth Century to the Present’,
in P. Rainbird (ed.), Monuments in the Landscape: Papers in Honour of Andrew

Fleming, Stroud: Tempus, 190–98.
Hamilakis, Y. (2009a), ‘Trasformare in Monumento: Archeologi, Fotografi e
l’Acropoli Ateniese dal Settecento a Oggi’, in M. Barbanera (ed.), Relitti Riletti:
Metamorfosi delle Rovine e Identita Culturale, Torino: B. Borringhieri, 179–94.
Hamilakis, Y. (2009b), ‘Μνημειοποίηση του τόπου: αρχαιολόγοι, φωτογράφοι,
και η αθηναϊκή Ακρόπολη από τον 18ο αιώνα έως σήμερα’, in M. Spyridakis
(ed.), Μετασχηματισμοί του Χώρου: Κοινωνικές και Πολιτισμικές Διαστάσεις,
Athens: Nisos, 373–96.
Hamilakis, Y. (2013), Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and
Affect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamilakis, Y., A. Anagnostopoulos and F. Ifantidis (2009), ‘Postcards from the
Edge of Time: Archaeology, Photography, Archaeological Ethnography
(A Photo-Essay)’, Public Archaeology 8(2–3): 283–309.
Hamilakis, Y. and F. Ifantidis (2013), ‘The Other Acropolises: Multi-temporality
and the Persistence of the Past’, in P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison and
A. Piccini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary
World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 758–81.
Hamilakis, Y. and A. Szegedy-Maszak (2001), ‘Nineteenth-century Photography
in Greece: Select Bibliography’, History of Photography 25(1): 44–5.
Ioannidis, K. (2008), Σύγχρονη ελληνική φωτογραφία: ένας αιώνας σε τριάντα
χρόνια, Athens: Futura.
Karali, M. (2012), ‘Η φωτογραφική προσωπογραφία και η επαγγελματική
φωτογραφία στην Ελλάδα του δέκατου ένατου αιώνα’, Mnimon 32: 89–124.
Kassianou, N. (2013a), ‘Σκαπανείς του τεχνικού πολιτισμού: από το φωτογραφικό
αρχείο της ΔΕΗ’, in I. Papaioanou (ed.), Η ελληνική φωτογραφία και η φωτογραφία
στην Ελλάδα, Athens: Nefeli, 99–113 (essay first published 2006).
Kassianou, N. (2013b), ‘Οι φωτογραφίες της Αντίστασης: Κατασκευάζοντας τους
μύθους στην ιστορία’, in I. Papaioanou (ed.), Η ελληνική φωτογραφία και η
φωτογραφία στην Ελλάδα, Athens: Nefeli, 64–81 (essay first published 2007).
Kracauer, S. (1993) [1927], ‘Photography’, translated by T.Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry
19: 421–36.
Kriebel, S.T. (2007), ‘Theories of Photography: A Short History’ in J. Elkins (ed.),
Photography Theory, New York and London: Routledge, 3–49.
Long, J.J., A. Noble and E. Welch (eds) (2009), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots,
London: Routledge.
Lyons, C.L., J.K. Papadopoulos, L.S. Stewart and A. Szegedy-Maszak (2005),

Archaeology and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, Los
Angeles: The Getty Museum.
Mahaira, E. (1987), Η νεολαία της Τετάρτης Αυγούστου, Athens: Istoriko Arheio
Ellinikis Neolaias, 13.
Moschovi, A. (2010), ‘Reimag(in)ing Arcadia: British Intervention in the Post-
War Reconstruction of Greece, c. 1945–1946’, in D. Wills (ed.), Greece and
Britain since 1945, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 61–97.

Moschovi, A. (2013), ‘Από την αναπαράσταση της πολιτικής στην πολιτική
της αναπαράστασης’, in I. Papaioanou (ed.), Η ελληνική φωτογραφία και η
φωτογραφία στην Ελλάδα, Athens: Nefeli, 145–73 (essay first published 2007).
Olin, M. (2012), Touching Photographs, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Όψεις της ελληνικής φωτογραφίας (1998), Municipality of Nice/Greek Ministry
of Culture.
Osborne, P. 2000, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Panayotopoulos, N. (2009), ‘On Greek Photography: Eurocentrism, Cultural
Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece’, Third Text
23(2): 181–94.
Petsini, P. (2013), ‘Οικειοποίηση και (αυτο)αναφορές: η εισαγωγή μεταμοντέρνων
εννοιών στη σύγχρονη ελληνική φωτογραφία’, in I. Papaioanou (ed.), Η ελληνική
φωτογραφία και η φωτογραφία στην Ελλάδα, Athens: Nefeli, 273–80.
Pinney, C. and N. Peterson (eds) (2003), Photography’s Other Histories, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Poole, D. (1997), Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Richin, F. (2009), After Photography, New York: Norton.
Schwartz, L.S. (ed.) (2007), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G.
Sebald, New York: Seven Stories Press.
Sekula, A. (1981), ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal 41(1): 15–25.
Sekula, A. (1992), ‘The Body and the Archive’, in R. Bolton (ed.), The Contest of
Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge: MIT Press, 343–88.
Stathatos, J. (1997), Εικόνα και είδωλο: νέα ελληνική φωτογραφία, Thessaloniki:
Thessaloniki Cultural Capital of Europe.
Stathatos, J. (2013), ‘Η επινόηση του ελληνικού τοπίου: ελληνικό τοπίο και
ελληνική φωτογραφία’, in I. Papaioanou (ed.), Η ελληνική φωτογραφία και η
φωτογραφία στην Ελλάδα, Athens: Nefeli, 114–44.
Steinberger, D. (1977), ‘The Song of Rolland: An Interpretation of Freud’s
“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis”’, American Imago 54(1): 69–80.
Stoller, A.L. (2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial
Common Sense, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tagg, J. (1988), The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories,
London: Macmillan.
Tomlinson, R. (1991), The Athens of Alma Tadema, Stroud Gloucestershire: Allan

Sutton.
Vervenioti, T. (2009), Αναπαραστάσεις της Ιστορίας: η δεκαετία του 1940 μέσα από
τα αρχεία του Διεθνούς Ερυθρού Σταυρού, Athens: Melissa.
Wells, L., T. Stylianou-Lambert and N. Philippou (eds) (2014), Photography and
Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.
Xanthakis, A. (1994), Ιστορία της ελληνικής φωτογραφίας 1839–1960, Athens:
Kastaniotis (first published 1981, English edition, translated by J. Solman and

G. Cox, 1988).
Papyros.
Yatromanolakis, Y. (2001), ‘Επίμετρο’, in A. Embirikos, Ταξίδι στη Ρωσσία:
Ημερολόγιο και φωτογραφίες, Δεκέμβριος 1962, Athens: Agra, 51–9.

23
Part I
Imag(in)ing the Nation


1
The Three-way Mirror:

Photography as Record, Mirror and Model of
Greek National Identity
John Stathatos
Classical landscape with columns
From its earliest appearance, photography in Greece participated, perhaps to a

greater extent and certainly more directly than any medium other than the written
word, in the never-ending enterprise of nation building. This was a far from
clearly defined, complex and manifold endeavour: the idea of the nation had to
be simultaneously identified, defined, fabricated and promoted. Photography was
in many ways ideally suited at least to the latter three of these tasks. At one and
the same time, photography provided society with a record, a mirror and a model.
The role of photography familiar to all is that of recorder; individual members of
society and the Greek state itself both realised that photography seemed to offer the
promise of an accurate and apparently unbiased record of achievement. At the same
time, photography held up a mirror to the nation, artfully displaying the face it most
wanted to see reflected; the resulting images, however distorted by wishful thinking,
represent an accurate record of a society’s aspirations. For example, the enormous
popularity of photographic representations of the transhumant pastoralists of the
Pindus in the 1950s clearly mirrored a yearning for a national origin myth rooted
in the supposed innocence, simplicity and freedom of life in the high mountains.1
The contribution of photography to the construction of national identity is not
of course a specifically Greek phenomenon, and similar narratives could no doubt
be constructed for most countries. However, the fact that the history of modern
Greece and that of the photographic medium share roughly the same time span,
1
Some of the most powerful and popular work in this idiom was produced by Kostas
Balafas (1920–2011) and Takis Tloupas (1920–2003). Both have been well served by recently
published and lavishly illustrated monographs; see in particular Balafas 2003 and Tloupas 2005.
25
as well as the accidents of history and geography which made of Greece such a late
developer amongst European nations, have resulted in an unusually dense and rich
interpenetration of photography and history.
The Greek state which came into being as a result of what was to become
known as the revolution of 1821, that uneasy mixture of national uprising, civil
war, class conflict and ethnic cleansing, was itself inevitably a strange hybrid of
very uncertain identity. The new state was, in truth, a disparate assemblage under
whose always uncertain authority were gathered uneasily together cosmopolitan

merchants and illiterate peasants, semi-piratical island shipowners and feudal
primates, great landowners and expatriate intellectuals, idealists and gangsters.
Furthermore, its actual and future citizens were scattered over an area greater
by far than its original core. What was to provide the necessary unifying factor,
now that the mirage of a supranational pan-Balkan federation had been finally
laid to rest? As Robert Shannan Peckham (2001: 6) puts it, ‘in part because of
the wide geographical distribution of the Greeks in diasporic communities […],
language and religion, rather than affiliation to a distinct territory, became the
chief determinants of Greek national identity’.
Language and faith were indeed the obvious unifying factors, but they were not
without their own problems; in the mid-nineteenth century, many citizens of the
new state – and of the provinces it was to acquire in the near future – spoke Greek,
if they did at all, only as a second language. Similarly, though the Hellenic world
subscribed in large part to the Orthodox faith, it included pockets of Catholic,
Jewish and Muslim Greeks, while of course Orthodoxy itself was shared by other
and potentially hostile national and linguistic groups throughout the Balkans.
From the earliest stirrings of the independence movement in all its disparate
manifestations, there seems to have been a general agreement that a national identity
would have to be forged from the idea of an unbroken historical continuity stretching
back to the distant past – above all, to classical antiquity. This was to become an issue
of crucial importance to the political and intellectual leadership of the new nation:
the Greeks of the 1830s must, they felt, be regarded as the direct lineal descendants
of Socrates and Epaminondas as well as, skipping several centuries, of Justinian and
the last Palaiologue. There was, of course, no concept then of nationhood as a self-
defining cultural phenomenon; if it was worth anything at all, national identity had to
be sought in the blood. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence that Kolokotronis
and Pericles had ultimately sprung from the same genetic stock, the forgers of
national identity, seizing upon Gottfried von Herder’s concept of a linguistic Volk,
made the most of the self-evident continuity of the Greek language.
The enormous moral and psychological value of material links with classical
antiquity was evident to the more thoughtful of the country’s leaders, as witness
the well-known passage in General Makriyannis’ memoirs (1964: 351) in which
he describes how he rescued a pair of ancient statues ‘so that they might be of use
to the fatherland’. Before even formal ratification of independence by the first
Convention of London, Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias had given orders for the
foundation of the country’s first archaeological museum (Woodhouse 1973: 429).
The three-way mirror 27
Figure 1.1 James Robertson, Temple of Olympian Zeus from the west,
1853–54
Source: © Benaki Museum Photographic Archive
Some of the earliest Greek archaeologists were in no doubt as to their priorities;

Peckham (2001: 117) quotes the unapologetic title of an article published in
1852 by Kyriakos Pittakis, who had been involved in the first restoration of the
Acropolis: ‘Material to be used to demonstrate that the inhabitants of Greece are

descendants of the Ancient Greeks’.
It was inevitable that the first photographic image taken in Greece should be of
the Acropolis of Athens, and just as inevitable that it should be followed by dozens
and eventually thousands of closely similar views; once the unique daguerreotype was
replaced by the infinitely reproducible albumen print, photographic images became
a mass producible and mass consumable item. For both the local market, however
restricted it might at first have been, and for the increasing number of foreign visitors,
Greece was for a long time synonymous with classical ruins, and classical ruins are
what they were offered in profusion by the photographic profession.
In less than a decade, photographs of ruins began to include what were held
to be characteristic representatives of the local population (Fig. 1.1). This was
partly to provide a useful scale against which to measure the columns, but also
in obedience to the dictates of newly fashionable orientalism, which preferred
its classicism seasoned with a dash of romance and exoticism – something
adequately catered for by extras in white kilts bearing yataghans and long-
barrelled muskets. At the same time, their presence was a reminder of the
continuity between the original builders and their descendants, a continuity both
Hellenes and Philhellenes were happy to emphasise.
Identity crisis
In time, the citizens of the new state, or at least those with the means and leisure
to consider such matters, would turn their minds to a consideration of their own
identity. Photographic portraiture, increasingly accessible thanks to the professional
studios established in perhaps surprising numbers by the mid-1850s, offered a mirror
in which the ruling classes could study their reflection and ponder the image they
wished to project. High society, under Greece’s first king, Otto of Bavaria, was an
uneasy but heady mixture of half-civilised warlords from the mountains, members of
the rapidly rising mercantile class, ambitious politicians and optimistic modernisers
from all over. The warlords were those lucky, skilful or ruthless enough to emerge
from the conflict with a commission in the new national army and a pension,
sometimes even a position in court; the modernisers launched into schemes for the
establishment of banks or educational institutions, many of which proved successful,
including the redoubtable Miss Fanny Hill’s school for young ladies.
Miss Hill being a moderniser, her girls were plainly but neatly clad in sober
European dress, but this was by no means the rule. At the pinnacle of society,
the king and queen both instituted a policy of cultural cross-dressing, actively
encouraging the wearing of Greek national dress at court. A very early group
photograph of Queen Amalia’s ladies-in-waiting includes the wives and daughters
of Greek notables wearing the authentic local costumes of Psara, Spetses, Hydra
and Epirus, as well as two German ladies in European court dress (Fig. 1.2). The
seated older woman and the young girl to her left are both wearing examples of an
Figure 1.2 Philibert Perraud, The ladies-in-waiting of Queen Amalia, 1847

outfit designed for the Queen; based on the dress of Nafpaktos, it became known
as the ‘Amalia’ and remained a favourite of fashionable ladies for a number of
decades, eventually achieving the status of authentic folk dress.
Unsurprisingly, the War of Independence remained the defining event in the
lives of those who lived through it. As such, it strongly affected how the participants
saw themselves, and the kind of image they wanted to project. We can see this in the
relatively large number of portraits from the 1850s and 1860s in which the more
politically and socially successful of the war leaders are photographed in variants of
the traditional Greek warrior’s costume, including the foustanella or pleated white
kilt. These are, of course, highly formalised versions of what the average kleft would
have worn in the 1820s, to which they bear the same relationship as do the kilts
and sporrans in Raeburn’s paintings to the plaids worn at Culloden; nevertheless,
what such portraits testify to is the fact that these men, once powerful military
leaders, were now equally influential members of the new order of things.
Inevitably, younger men, or men who perhaps had not fought at all, adopted
the same style of self-representation, wearing the foustanella as a mark of national
allegiance, or else because it had become, following the example of King Otto, the
fashionable thing to be seen and photographed in; just as inevitably, the style did
not necessarily flatter the more sedentary individuals. Finally, by the 1870s, what
had been a visual signifier of courage and devotion to a national ideal was acquiring
overtones of cliché, even of mockery.
The future of Greece, it was becoming clear to all forward-looking men, lay
with Western Europe, and sartorially at least, the ruling class conformed within a
single generation. We can see the process at work in a wonderfully evocative family
group by Margaritis, which shows a grizzled paterfamilias in full evzone regalia,

including decorations, while ranged behind him stand his three sons. They are not
merely wearing western dress, but three distinct variants of it: on the left, a clean-
shaven bohemian lounger in checked pants, three fingers thrust provocatively in
his trouser pocket; in the middle, the full-bearded son in sober, buttoned-up black
who is clearly destined for the role of hardworking family provider; and on the
right, the highly unreliable-looking boulevardier, complete with waxed moustache
and cane. Add to the mixture a formidable looking wife and a clearly discontented
daughter, and you have the cast of a peculiarly cynical play by Molière.
The royal dynasty inaugurated by Prince Christian William Ferdinand
Adolphus George Glücksburg in 1863 felt able to abandon cultural cross-dressing,
and to my knowledge there exists no photograph of King George I in a foustanella.
This is probably just as well; in the portraits taken by Petros Moraites, now official
court photographer, the Georges, father and son, have the aspect of melancholy
and rather anxious greyhounds. Only the women of the court remained faithful
to the glamour of ‘Greek’ costume, however remote by this time from folk origins.
In a group photograph of Queen Olga surrounded by royal princesses and
ladies-in-waiting dated around 1895, they no longer wear the rather simple and
elegant Amalia dress, but some altogether more spurious assemblages to which,
incongruously, have been added white gloves. In a nod to more remote antiquity,
the train of Mrs Kriezi, standing on the far right, has acquired a border with an
antique ‘key pattern’.
The bureaucratic and mercantile classes had always regarded themselves as
part of a greater pan-European caste, so that Georgios Stavrou, Governor of the
Bank of Greece for a total of 28 years, looks no different in the early 1860s from
his opposite number at the Bank of England. By the last decade of the century,
members of the upper classes had transformed themselves to the point of being
indistinguishable from their Italian, French or British contemporaries, from the
politician’s frock coat and dundrearies to the symbolist poet’s black felt hat and
Daliesque moustaches.
Apart from recording the change in dress and appearance of the Greeks,
photography also celebrated their rapidly changing environment. Whilst ancient
ruins and monuments remained favoured subjects, urban landscape photography
would proudly record the dramatic expansion of the capital. Indeed, not only was
the density of building increasing, but Athens was also expanding rapidly across
Attica, northwards towards Kifissia and south-eastwards to the Faliron delta.
The great leap forward instituted under Harilaos Trikoupis in 1882 which laid
Figure 1.3 Unknown photographer, Extension of the Athens-Piraeus line from

Monastiraki to Omonoia, c. 1895. Albumen print, 16.5 x 22cm
Source: © ELIA/MIET Photographic Archives
the foundations of the country’s infrastructure was also carefully recorded on film.
‘To Trikoupis’, writes Woodhouse (1977: 173–5), ‘the country owed its system of
protective tariffs, the passage of social and industrial legislation, the development
of communications by land and sea, and the establishment of limited companies.
[…] The era of post-revolutionary stagnation was over’.
Industrial photography now made its appearance, focused primarily on the
great public works programmes of the 1880s and 1890s, including such visually
dramatic subjects as the opening of the Corinth canal and the Athens-Piraeus
railway line. Though research remains to be done on the ways in which they were
disseminated, images such as these helped publicise and promote what were, for
a poor country, enormously costly projects. The dramatising of major industrial
achievements by means of powerful visual imagery is something which would
resurface several times in the next century, most notably during the post-WWII
reconstruction and the subsequent campaign of electrification.
During the same period, the adoption of western dress filtered down to the urban
working class, among whom traditional dress had become largely extinct by the end
of the century. Careful examination of a photograph taken around 1895 depicting
the extension of the railway line from Monastiraki to Omonoia, for instance, shows
a total of some 50 recognisable workmen; of these, only one appears to be wearing

the traditional high-wasted baggy breeches and soft cap (Fig. 1.3).
The ‘Great Endeavour’
Up until the 1880s, photography played a significant role in the construction

of national identity: at first by helping legitimise the new state’s moral claim of
descent from Byzantium and ultimately from classical Greece, and subsequently
by encouraging its development from an anarchic Balkan backwater to an aspirant
to contemporary European statehood. At no point, however, during those first 40-
odd years, did it develop an overtly nationalist rhetoric. That was to change during
the last decades of the nineteenth century, as irredentism and the Megali Idea, the
‘Great Endeavour’,2 took hold of the imaginations of the nation and its leaders.
At its most utopian, the Megali Idea looked forward to the reconstruction of the
Byzantine Empire with its capital at Constantinople.
The infant Greek state had already been enriched by the acquisition, at long
last, of the Ionian Islands, which were ceded by Britain upon the accession to the
throne of King George I of the Hellenes. The actual handover took place a year
later, in June 1864, apparently much to the relief of the British, for whom the
islands had ceased to have any great strategic value, becoming instead a nuisance
to be shed with little regret or compunction (Holland 2012: 96–8).
The first expansion of the mainland took place bloodlessly in May 1881, when
a settlement imposed upon the Ottoman Empire by the Great Powers handed
over Thessaly. The acquisition of the rich Thessalian plain acted as a spur to the
Greek economy, provoking a development boom for industry and commerce.
In this situation, photography played a role essentially similar to the one it had
played in America’s westward expansion. One way for a town, region or company
to bring itself to the notice of potential investors was by commissioning elaborate
presentation albums of photographs. Three such albums in the photographic archive
of the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive of the Cultural Foundation of the
National Bank of Greece commemorate the wave of entrepreneurial enthusiasm
which followed the annexation of Thessaly, dated respectively 1885, 1895 and
1897. The oldest is titled Souvenir de Thessalie and includes a manuscript dedication
to ‘the respected Mr Deliyannis’, the ultra-nationalist Greek prime minister.
2
Megali Idea is traditionally translated as ‘Great Idea’; it was certainly an actual ‘idea’,
and that is, of course, the literal translation. However, to a patriotic Greek of that period, it
would have been clear that the Megali Idea was not simply an abstract concept, but a very
specific national objective, an endeavour with concrete aims which would inevitably call for
almost superhuman efforts on the part of the nation; more than that, it represented (however
unrealistically) the longed-for triumphant conclusion to the slow, painful construction of
the Greek nation state. For this reason, I believe ‘Great Endeavour’ to be a more accurate
reflection of the complex web of allusions implicit in Megali Idea.
It contains 24 fine albumen prints by Dimitrios Michailides of Adrianople, among

them a remarkable panoramic view of the monasteries of the Meteora. The second
album, titled Thessaly Railroad: The Volos-Lehonia Line, also carries a dedication to
Theodoros Deliyannis, this time in his capacity as Minister of Finance and President
of the Council of Ministers. Unfortunately the photographer or photographers are
not identified, as is also the case with the third album, published in 1897 by the
Board of Trade of the city of Volos (Stathatos 1996: 31).
The settlement of 1881 excluded much of Epirus, and was in any case seen as
merely a first step in the implementation of the Megali Idea. By the last decade
of the century, the nation’s self-confidence was high, boosted by the unexpected
international success of the first Olympic Games in 1896, whose hero – once
again represented in emblematic national dress – was the humble market gardener
Spyros Louis, winner of the marathon foot race. Greek irredentism was now
focused primarily on Epirus and Macedonia in the north, and on the Megalonisos,
the ‘Great Island’ of Crete in the south, where sporadic insurrections had become
endemic. The mid-1890s were marked by increasing patriotic enthusiasm and
belligerency, actively encouraged by the government of Deliyannis (Papacosma
1977: 10–11). Taken during that period, a photograph of the interior of the Athens
Officers’ Club betrays an almost hysterical profusion of gigantic national flags, an
immense royal coat of arms, a riot of smaller flags, wreaths and crowns and, at the
far right, a solitary Union Jack. I think we may take it for granted that this was not
the usual decoration of the mess, and must have represented a special occasion for
the display of patriotic fervour – most likely the ultimately disastrous outbreak of
war with Turkey in spring 1897.
With Crown Prince Constantine in command of the Greek army in Thessaly,
the royal family became closely identified with Deliyannis’s war policies. Wearing
the uniform of a Red Cross nurse, Queen Olga was photographed by the bedside
of the unfortunate Pavlos Kouzounas, the war’s first casualty; despite the royal
personage’s rather wooden rigidity, this is a very early example of a successfully
stage-managed ‘photo opportunity’. It includes a careful arrangement of royal
portraits seemingly casually pinned to the wall behind her.
Unfortunately, no amount of stage management could help the badly led and
disorganised Greek troops, and the crown prince’s forces were quickly overrun.
Within a matter of weeks, the Turkish army reached Lamia. The war ended in
May with a humiliating peace, border rectifications in Turkey’s favour and the
payment of an indemnity. The Macedonian question however remained open, and
Greek efforts now switched from open warfare to a guerrilla war conducted by
irregular bands, usually commanded by regular officers of the Greek army on very
unofficial leave of absence; these bands, which became known as makedonomahoi,
directed their operations not so much against the Turks, whose abandonment of
the Balkans was regarded as merely a matter of time, but against their Bulgarian
opposites, the comitadjis or ‘committee men’ who were, like the Greeks, intent on
imposing a de facto presence on the ground in advance of the inevitable Turkish
withdrawal. Anastasia Karakasidou (1997: 105) has, with some justification,
suggested that ‘these conflicts in Macedonia might more aptly be termed wars of
national creation rather than the more teleological wars of “national liberation”’.
One of these officers was Pavlos Melas, the charismatic scion of an influential
and very well-connected Athenian family. Appointed to overall command of the
irregular forces in the Kastoria and Monastir areas in August 1904, he was to be
killed in action a few months later. His romantic death, his social position and
above all, the circumstances of the times which called for a hero to redeem the
humiliations of the recent past, rocketed Melas to instant posthumous fame –

making him into the first undoubted national hero since the War of Independence.
His grave in the village of Statitsa was photographed by the Kastorian
photographer Leonidas Papazoglou in conditions of some secrecy; though as
he was to write, ‘I was afraid at first to take a photograph lest I get myself into
trouble’, Papazoglou exposed two large glass plates as dusk was falling (Golombias
2004: 13–14). The resulting images were widely reproduced in the Greek press and
subsequently circulated in the form of postcards. It is hard to say how, or to what
extent, the decoration of the grave was stage-managed by the photographer; the
backdrop was certainly added by him, and if, as he writes, the village was frequently
visited by Turks, the profusion of wreaths and ribbons seems unconvincing.
Interestingly, however, the decor includes a mass-produced lithographic print of
Melas which must have been published within a very short space of time. The
lithographed print remained in circulation for decades, as can be seen in the
photograph of a memorial service held at the exact same place in 1930.
The relative paucity of military imagery from the 1897 war was due partly to
its brevity and partly to the technical limitations of photographic equipment – and
also, no doubt, because most people wished to forget all about it as soon as possible.
This was to change during the course of the subsequent conflict, which virtually
doubled the extent of the Greek state and, incidentally, assigned to photography
a role greater than it would ever again play in any future conflict. The ultimately
successful Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 rode a crest of popular patriotic
enthusiasm which both fed upon and was aroused by an abundance of pictorial
material, including not only photographs but also prints and even paintings.
A considerable quantity of photographs survives, the vast majority anonymous.
Though a number of professionals followed the army, the ready availability of the
new folding Kodak vest-pocket and box cameras meant that many officers and
even a number of soldiers were able to take photographs in the field.
The public’s insatiable appetite for images was fed in a number of ways: by
reproduction in postcard format; by the sale of mass-produced original prints, singly
or already placed in albums; by the sale of magic lantern slides; above all, perhaps,
through the publication of mass-circulation partworks, of which the best-known was
the Panorama of the 1912–1913 War of Anestis Konstantinidis. Some issues of the
latter included the following editorial announcement: ‘The publishers of “Panorama
1912–1913” request those artists or photographers who may have followed the Greek
army, or found themselves in its path, to kindly send them by means of the post office
anything relevant to the war’ (Xanthakis 2008: 246).
Figure 1.4 Rhomaides and Zeitz, The aristocracy of Athens ministering to the
wounded in Filipiada, 1912
Source: From the ‘Photographic Album of the Unknown Corporal of 1912’ (Aktia
Nikopolis Foundation)
Judging by the number of complete albums which survive, there can be

little doubt that the diffusion of original prints was considerable. The so-called
‘Photographic album of the unknown corporal of 1912’, now in the possession of
the Aktia Nikopolis Foundation, includes a total of 110 photographs, many by
A. Romaides and F. Zeitz, with their characteristic RZ monograph engraved on
the negative. The as yet unidentified corporal was apparently a driver during the
Epirus and Macedonia campaigns: ‘In this capacity it would appear that he was
often able to come into contact with the photographers of the time, carrying them
from place to place, posing for them and taking photographs of the places they
visited’ (Karambelas 2002: 10). One of these photographs (Fig. 1.4), of women
in nurses’ whites passing around hot drinks to a group of soldiers, is annotated
(presumably by the corporal himself ), ‘The aristocracy of Athens ministering to
the wounded in Filippiada’ – a harking back to the rhetoric of the photograph of
Queen Olga in 1897, but also evidence of a tradition of service which survived
into the Albanian campaign of WWII.
Such images served as models or sources of inspiration for the popular
chromolithographs based, however imaginatively, upon photographic
documentation. In some cases, the print was an almost exact reproduction of

the original photograph in a different medium with, at the most, a tidying up of
unwanted visual clutter; in others, as in numerous prints celebrating the Greek
victory at the battle of Sarandaporo, imagination ran riot. Often, an artist might
combine elements from two or more photographs to produce an idealised version
of the event depicted, as was the case with a much-reproduced (and modified)
image of the king and crown prince leading the Greek army into Salonica;
in one of the most imaginative versions, perhaps in acknowledgement of the

photographic sources of his inspiration, the artist has introduced a young man
with a box camera on a balcony just above the king’s head.
The first harvest of the Megali Idea proved rich beyond measure, though not
beyond expectations, which remained higher than ever. The ‘Great Endeavour’
had, indeed, sown dragon’s teeth which would not come to fruition for another
decade, but the signs were there in the spring of 1913, when a lunatic assassinated
King George I in Salonika and Constantine came to the throne: ‘He bore the
name of the founder and the last Emperor of Byzantium, and many wished to
call him Constantine XII in succession to the latter. Few doubted that he would
one day reign in the city whose name he shared’ (Woodhouse 1977: 194). Indeed,
Constantinople remained a potent and terrible mirage.
After the Great War, Greece’s belated entry on the side of the Allies was rewarded
with the cession of all that remained of Turkey in Europe, with the notable exception
of Constantinople itself, and with control over Smyrna and its hinterland; the
occupation was to last for a period of five years, when a plebiscite would determine
whether it should remain Greek, or revert to Turkey. By the end of the war, Greece
had nearly a quarter of a million men under arms, many of whom had been serving
for almost a decade. In the spring of 1919, Venizelos, responding to the request of the
Big Three (Britain, France and the US), ordered the army to occupy Smyrna, but his
ambitious plans were already unravelling under the pressure of events, including the
growing disunity of the allies and the growing power of Mustafa Kemal. In October
1920, the fateful decision was taken to launch the Greek army in Smyrna against
the still disorganised troops of Kemal, inaugurating the final chapter of what is still
referred to by Greeks today as the ‘Asia Minor Disaster’.
Boissonnas & Co.
The most complete photographic record of the campaign from the Greek side was
made by a young Swiss artist, Henri-Paul Boissonnas, son of the better-known
Frédéric. The Boissonnas family of Geneva were, to all extents and purposes, the
Greek government’s photographic and propaganda branches rolled into one. The
very close relationship between this dynasty of philhellene Swiss publishers and
photographers on the one hand, and the Greek state on the other, was based on equal
amounts of sentiment and commercial calculation. In effect, Frédéric Boissonnas
placed his considerable talents, as well as those of the family printing firm, at the
service of the expansionist ambitions of the Greek state. As Irini Boudouri noted
(2003: 35), ‘from his earliest journeys in Greece, Frédéric Boissonnas had already
foreseen the political, commercial and tourist publicity which could be generated
by photography. […] He became the fugleman of what for Greece was a radical
new policy which would place the immediacy, the ‘objectivity’, but also the poetry of
the photographic image at the service of national interest’. Boissonnas had already
secured a small grant from King George I as far back as 1907, but the first real
sponsorship came in 1913 for the purpose of photographing the newly-acquired

territories of Epirus and Macedonia – and, more importantly, of disseminating the
images.
Boissonnas more than fulfilled his part of the bargain. An exhibition entitled
Visions of Greece, held in Paris during February and March 1919, included no fewer
than 550 of his photographs, and the lectures presented in the context of this
exhibition were published (by the family firm) in a 260-page illustrated volume.
Some of the comments made in his welcoming speech by Edouard Chapuisat,
editor-in-chief of the influential Journal de Genève, underline both the seriousness
with which the event was regarded by the Greek government, and the almost
messianic importance Boissonnas and his philhellenic supporters attached to his
mission: ‘Today, all eyes are turned upon Greece, which aspires to regain that place
in the East which she occupied so many centuries ago. The support of faithful allies
allows us to anticipate the hour when Greece, which has given the world the purest
jewels of civilisation, will contribute to the reconstruction of Europe on the very
borders of the East’ (Chapuisat 1919: x).
With the end of the war and the beginning of the long drawn-out peace
negotiations, a new contract was drawn up whereby Frédéric and his sons
undertook the publication between 1920 and 1926 of a number of illustrated
books – volumes which included the telling titles Smyrna, Thrace, Constantinople
and The Greek Presence in Asia Minor. Frédéric’s position was made even clearer in
his written report of 26 November 1922, quoted by Boudouri (2003: 54, endnote
18): ‘the text of these works – quite apart from the high artistic quality of the
illustrations – reaffirms in the most categorical way the legitimacy of [Greek]
claims over these contested regions’ – in other words, he considered that the books
would make a substantial contribution to the legitimisation of Greek claims upon
the contested regions. Two volumes published in 1920–21 conformed closely to
this prescription; they were La Campagne d’Epire and its companion, La Campagne
de Macédoine; both included photographs by Frédéric and texts by Fernand Feyler,
a retired Swiss colonel and military historian.
The defeat of Venizelos in the elections of November 1920 and the country’s
increasing diplomatic isolation after the advance into western Asia Minor
(Llewellyn Smith 1998: 129) triggered a frantic effort by the Foreign Ministry’s
Press Bureau to ensure positive coverage in the international press. A new and
extremely advantageous contract was signed with Frédéric’s son Henri-Paul and
with Feyler, whereby the two would cover the campaign; Henri-Paul would provide
the Greek government with photographs, as well as placing some in the Swiss
press, while Feyler undertook to publish articles in the Journal de Genève and also
to publish a book about the campaign and ‘the rights of Hellenism in Asia Minor’.3
The satisfactory arrangement the Greek ministry came to with the French press,
as reported by Boudouri (2003: 54, endnote 20), would probably raise eyebrows
today: ‘For the purposes of acquiring the French Press, the newspapers Matin,
Journal, Echo de Paris and Petit Parisien were paid 100,000 francs each during
the course of 1921. The newspapers also undertook to “refrain from publishing
anything which would adversely affect our interests […] and furthermore, to
publish the reports and bulletins with which we will supply them”’. Henri-Paul
also proved a worthwhile investment, since during the course of his five-month
sojourn with the Greek army, he succeeded in placing at least 800 photos with the
international press; his images were also disseminated by the Foreign Ministry to
the press as well as to military, diplomatic and political recipients.
Unfortunately, Henri-Paul was the one member of the Boissonnas family
who appears to have been largely devoid of photographic talent. His photographs
are frequently out of focus, and he obviously had considerable trouble framing
correctly; his prints are often confusing, and he has a bad habit of chopping off bits
of his subjects, whether heads, roofs, masts or gun barrels; it comes as no surprise to
learn that on his return from Asia Minor, he announced his intention of giving up
photography and devoting himself to the restoration of artworks. Nevertheless, he
did occasionally manage to take a dramatic or at least interesting shot, such as the
one of a Greek cavalry squadron advancing at Seindi Gazi. His bleak picture of the
Greek army trudging wearily through the wastes of the Anatolian plateau south
of Ankara is a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable an army with enormously
extended lines of supply would eventually become in this kind of terrain.
The younger Boissonnas was not, of course, the only photographer with the
Greek expeditionary corps, though he probably spent more time with it than any
of his colleagues. The Photographic Service of the Greek army was formed in
December 1920 to coordinate the activities of photojournalists with the troops
(Varlas 2003: 28); its duties presumably included a certain amount of censorship, but
its primary purpose was to publicise the expedition’s successes, of which there were
indeed many before the fatal loss of momentum on the banks of the Sakarya river
in September 1921. Photographers who spent some time on the front included the
Gaziades brothers and the painter, cinematographer and photographer Georgios
Prokopiou, several of whose carefully posed tableaux later served as the basis for oil
paintings. In June 1922, the army’s Photographic Service organised an exhibition
in Athens under the title ‘Military Art from the Asia Minor Army’. It was billed as
the first such exhibition, but there was, of course, never to be a second.
3
Boudouri 2003: 38. The complete contract is reproduced in the Appendix (pp. 256–
7) of this volume.
‘Who we are’
By the first decade of the twentieth century, photography in various guises had
become commonplace for the urban sophisticates of the larger cities and towns; in
the hands of the more prosperous classes, it even became a popular hobby, leading
in some cases, such as that of Mary Paraskeva, the daughter of Crimean millionaire
Ioannis Gryparis, to a substantial and valuable body of work. In the countryside,
however, many people had never as yet seen themselves portrayed in a photograph;
to do so was still a rare, even an uncanny experience. Even once it became feasible,
perhaps after a professional photographer had set up shop somewhere reasonably
accessible, photographic portraiture was limited to a very few of life’s major
milestones: birth sometimes, certainly if at all possible marriage, and the inevitable
group photograph of parents, grandparents and children. An additional spur was
provided by emigration; in many of the poorer regions of Greece, men would
emigrate on their own, return if successful to get married and father a child, and
then leave again for perhaps many years at a time, leaving mother and children
behind. In such cases, there would be a steady demand for portraits of wives,
growing children and aging parents.
Such was the case on the remote Ionian island of Kythera, where in 1920,
Panayotis Fatseas opened a photographic studio in the little market town of Livadi;
he had returned from a two years’ residence in New York on the outbreak of the
Balkan War, bringing with him a camera, one of the first on the island. Over the
next 18 years, he photographed most of the people in the south of the island; the
main source of demand for his work is identified by an advertisement he published
in the local press, emphasising that ‘orders can be accepted directly from America
and Australia for portraits of the relatives of immigrants’.
The core of the Fatseas archive, quantitatively and qualitatively, is undoubtedly
made up of his portraits. The most superficial glimpse is enough to confirm how
different they are from the average commercial portraits of the period. They stand
out first of all for their immediacy and animation, free of that fatal rigidity which
transforms so many subjects of early twentieth-century photographic portraiture
into dummies. They stare back at us, most of them, seriously but unaffectedly.
Though these images include the incidental period information which is the usual
attraction of old photographs, in this case it is unlikely to hold our attention; on the
contrary, our gaze settles upon the evocative faces of the sitters, upon the postures
which betray so much about them and their relationship with one another. These are,
it seems, paradoxically contemporary images – or perhaps, like all good art, they are
simply timeless.
Did Fatseas stage his portraits? We do not know. Or rather, yes – of course he
staged them; but he did not practice what is meant today by staged photography.
In other words, he did not invent stories or devise alternative realities. On the
contrary, the purpose of staging was to emphasise the objective nature of those
passing before his lens. The way he arranged people in front of the background
curtain was a kind of staging, and so was his ever more restrained use of the simple
Figure 1.5 Panayotis Fatseas, Grigoria Kassimatis and Areti Megalokonomos,

1924
Source: Kythera Photographic Archive
props he allowed himself: the few flower petals scattered on the floor at the feet
of the young girls, the carved walking stick flourished proudly by a gendarme, the
sprig of basil held by a solitary woman, a bouquet, the dog curled up beneath his
master’s chair, a long-barrelled shotgun.
And after all, the way he approached his subjects was itself a form of staging: an
approach which instead of intimidating, allowed them to be, quite simply, themselves.
These portraits offer themselves up for deliberate scrutiny, and the eye constantly
discovers emotionally and visually charged details which bring an added
dimension to the image: the ‘best’ jacket of the young boy whose too-short
sleeves hover just above the wrists, the heavy hobnailed boots worn with a formal
suit, or the almost but not quite identical dresses worn by two young women of
the same family (Fig. 1.5) (Stathatos 2008: 17–18).
Alan Trachtenberg’s (2005: 19) perceptive comment about Mike Disfarmer,
that distant colleague of Fatseas, applies no less to the Greek photographer:
‘… his people leap out; nothing distracts attention from them, from the physical
details which comprise them and make their bodies and dress and expressions
such plausible vehicles of particular lives – the delicacy of a hand touching a
shoulder, the twist of an ankle, the tilt of a hat, the rumpled folds of trousers, the
fall of cotton dresses on the work-stiffened bodies of country women’.
Reinventing Crete
By the mid-1920s, the promotion of Greece as a tourist destination was taken

increasingly seriously by the government, and from 1929 onwards, a succession
of organisations was formed to undertake that promotion (Katsiyannis 2009).
Though graphic design featured strongly in official posters and publications,
photography was regarded as equally if not more important; one of the first high-
quality lithographic posters to be issued by the Office for Greek Tourism featured a
photograph of the Parthenon by Nelly,4 the nom d’artiste adopted by Elli Seraidari.
Nelly, who opened a studio in Athens in 1924, had already travelled and
photographed extensively around Greece in the late 1920s. Shortly after the
establishment of General Metaxas’s dictatorship in August 1936, she was
commissioned by Theologos Nikoloudis, the new regime’s Under-Secretary
for Press and Tourism, to photograph on behalf of the press office. As she
writes in her memoirs (1989: 147), ‘the Ministry gave me the assignment of
touring Greece at intervals in order to photograph the country’s treasures and
beauty spots; this was for the illustrated albums they planned to publish every
three months in three languages, French, English and German’. One of the
regions she photographed most extensively was Crete,5 whose hinterland in
particular was still little visited at the time; for a woman to venture there, even
4
See also Zacharia, this volume.
5
Nelly was bad with dates and almost never gives any in her memoirs. According to
the dates in the volume Κρήτη/Crete, co-published in 2001 by the Benaki Museum (which
owns her archive), she photographed Crete on two separate occasions, in 1927 and 1939.
Figure 1.6 Fréderic Boissonnas, Kalokairinou Avenue, Herakleion, 1920

in company with her husband and an official guide, was regarded as something
of an adventure.
Crete had previously been intensively photographed by the indefatigable
Frédéric Boissonnas in 1910 and again in 1920. Boissonnas’s Crete was largely
urban and multicultural. Mirroring their subject, his photographs are lively and
even chaotic; lots of things are going on in them at the same time: an old man in a
fez stumbles past clutching an armful of empty sacks; a sign proclaims a roadside
café to be the ‘Club International’; a boy helps secure a load of baskets onto a
recalcitrant donkey; an itinerant tea-vendor is serving customers seated outside
a greengrocer’s shop; a man in a European suit and white panama hat shares
the street with a Cretan wearing boots, breaches, sash and a fancy waistcoat
(Fig. 1.6).
By the time of Nelly’s first visit in 1927, the mutual Greco-Turkish ethnic
cleansing known as the ‘population exchange’ had scoured Crete of Turks and
Turkish-speaking Greeks, and the cosmopolitan world Boissonnas had known
was no longer. Nelly’s photographs, however, still have a touch of Boissonnas’s
essentially neutral way of seeing; they include views of monasteries, antiquities and
some fine landscapes, though rather fewer street scenes. By 1939, when she revisited
Figure 1.7 Nelly, Cretans, 1939

the island as the representative, however humble, of the dictatorship’s propaganda

arm, Crete was being reinvented with Nelly’s enthusiastic collaboration.
In place of the cosmopolitan subtleties of the past, she now propounded a
simplistic and entirely Greek image with the stress on a gallant, even heroic
rural simplicity. In comparison to her earlier vision, the new images are almost
shockingly crude, particularly in their blatantly dramatic or sentimental staging

of the male form. Remembering Sfakia, the mountainous region where most of
the photographs were taken, Nelly (1989: 165–6) was to write: ‘I couldn’t believe
my eyes […] I will never forget my surprise when I saw all these men assembled,
well-dressed and cared for; I thought I was on another planet. Nowhere and
never had I encountered so many handsome men gathered together’. In a flurry
of boots, capes, beards, headcloths and daggers, Nelly’s photos were reclaiming
Crete for the fatherland – and for tourism (Fig. 1.7).
Urbanity
The collapse of the ‘Great Endeavour’ was naturally an unmitigated disaster for
Greece, leading to the forced exchange of populations and introducing a million
or so distressed refugees to a poor and exhausted country. Certain side effects,
however, were to prove beneficial in the long run. Though in most cases they
arrived utterly destitute, the refugees brought with them invaluable if invisible
assets, above all a generally higher level of education than mainland Greeks, and
distinctly more sophisticated industrial and agricultural skills; to these were added
the natural energy and ambition of hard-working people who had everything to
gain. If the building and infrastructure programme initiated by Trikoupis in the
1880s represented the country’s first major step towards modernisation, there is no
doubt that the arrival of the Asia Minor refugees marked the definitive swing from
a largely agrarian to a largely urban population.
Like the great leap forward of the previous century, this change, too, would be
well documented photographically: on the one hand, governments, ministries and
non-governmental organisations were all keen to publicise their efforts, while on
the other, the change in their circumstances was something that all those struggling
to improve their lives wanted to see recorded and memorialised. The characteristic
feature of social documentation in these circumstances was the group photograph.
Whereas Fatseas’s subjects were portrayed as solitary individuals or, at most, as
nuclear families, still enclosed in the centuries-old isolation of the countryside, the
newly emergent and newly politicised urban population saw itself, and wished to
see itself pictured as – above all – a social entity.
Perhaps the most talented and certainly the most dedicated recorder of these
decades was the photojournalist Petros Poulidis (Arseni 2004: passim). One
of several major Greek photographers whose work has yet to receive the study
it deserves, he is sometimes dismissed as mere recorder of events or a source
of nostalgic trivia; in fact his true subject, whether or not consciously realised,
was the rise of the Greek urban working and middle classes. This fundamental
change in society was methodically recorded by Poulidis, from the arrival of the
refugees, the resultant acceleration of primary and technical education, the earliest
experiments in public housing, the rise of worker’s associations and unions and,
most interestingly in many ways, the development of leisure – something hitherto

the exclusive privilege of the ruling class.
He photographs public holidays and private celebrations, even the first holiday-
makers on the beaches of Attica, in Vari, Vouliagmeni and Voula. Their summer
shacks and automobiles suddenly appear side-by-side with the huts of the local
farmers, many of them still wearing traditional clothes – that is to say, the clothing
worn for work in the fields, not the versions seen in court or museums. What,
after all, could be more radical than the very concept of holidays, for a people
accustomed to a life of back-breaking labour from childhood to deepest old age?
One perhaps insufficiently studied aspect of photography is the way in
which responses to the camera change over time. Studying Poulidis’s group
photographs, one realises that his subjects are, by and large, sufficiently familiar
with the process not to be overawed by it, but not so familiar as to be jaded;
they respond with neither the solemnity their parents might have displayed, nor
yet with the bored indifference with which their grandchildren will react to yet
another group snapshot. The result is that each person in the group comes across
very strongly as an individual personality rather than a cipher. His photograph
of a family celebration taken in 1940 includes 28 separate men, women and
children spanning three generations, each one a sharply delineated individual;
looking at the group, and noting the date, one cannot help wondering how many
of them would still be alive in 1950, after 10 years of war, occupation, famine
and civil war.
The ‘Black Album’
With the rejection of an Italian ultimatum on 28 October 1940, Greece

found herself dragged into WWII. The Greek army at first held its own, then
succeeded in forcing an Italian withdrawal halfway across Albania; but in
April 1941, Germany came to the rescue of her ally, and the country ended
up under tripartite German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation. The policies of
all three administrations, but above all that of the German zone, were much
closer to that displayed in the Ukraine than in the West European countries
then under occupation: instead of a rational exploitation of the captive economy,
the Germans opted for outright plunder. As Mark Mazower (1995: 26) writes,
‘these policies of expropriation and plunder – the reflection of an ultimately self-
defeating tendency in Berlin to see the economic benefits of conquest before the
political ones – had a catastrophic impact in Greece. […] But worst of all was
the effect on the supply of food’.
The consequence of wholesale food expropriation was magnified in the
autumn of 1941 by the poor crops of the previous two years, by lack of transport,
by hoarding, by the British blockade, and by the fact that the Bulgarian zone of
occupation, despite including only 15 per cent of the national territory, had been
the source of 40 per cent of the country’s total wheat production, 80 per cent
of its butter and 60 per cent of its egg production – little or none of which was
now reaching the other zones. The result was a famine during the unusually hard
winter of 1941–42, above all in the Greater Athens area, where ‘in January there
[were] 465,000 registered in soup kitchens and famine reached its peak with a
five-fold increase in deaths compared to the average deaths in January before the
war’ (Bournova 2006). According to a study commissioned by the Red Cross,
‘about 250,000 people had died directly or indirectly as a result of the famine
between 1941 and 1943’ (Mazower 1995: 41).

If the famine was provoked by the Axis occupation forces (and it is worth
quoting Mazower’s opinion that despite what many people believed at the time,
‘there was no deliberate German plan of extermination’), it was undoubtedly
prolonged by the Allied embargo. Mazower’s (1995: 46) view is that ‘had matters
been left to British civil servants, it is doubtful whether the blockade would have
been lifted. But there was a vital difference between the Axis powers and the
Allies. Public opinion in Britain and the USA was aroused by the news of the
famine. Slowly and belatedly, the British came round to the idea of supporting
an international relief effort for Greece’. There can be no doubt that it was the
international relief efforts organised through the Red Cross and neutral countries
which saved the country from a second winter of famine. And international
opinion was aroused, in turn, largely by photographs; this was, in fact, the single
most effective case in Greek history of propaganda by the photographic image.
Though street photography was forbidden and film was at a premium, largely
because the local Kodak factory had been blown up by the retreating allies
(Xanthakis 2008: 381), a few brave and resourceful photographers managed
to record the occupation and subsequent famine in Athens. They included the
journalist and amateur photographer Kostas Parashos and members of the
Police Criminological Services Department, but perhaps the most successful
efforts at publicising the appalling situation were those of the great modernist
Voula Papaioannou. Apart from native talent and a considerable fund of
courage, Papaioannou possessed another invaluable asset: her connections with
international organisations and with the diplomats of neutral countries.
During the course of an interview taped in 1988, Papaioannou (2006: 70)
spoke at length about this time: ‘As soon as the occupation began, cameras
were forbidden. Then I worked with a hidden camera. That was my resistance.
I happened to know [Amalia] Lykourezou;6 we had both worked for the Near East
Foundation. Everybody there knew me, as did the Swiss. They had a representative
here reporting back on the situation, Franco Brenni, and we worked together. […]
We would take photographs and smuggle them abroad, for the starving children’.
6
Amalia Lykourezou, daughter of Konstantinos Lykourezos, public prosecutor and
Member of Parliament, was a volunteer nurse and member of Near East Foundation. The
foundation is described as ‘the United States’ oldest nonsectarian international development
NGO’; http://www.neareast.org/whoweare/history (accessed 10 August 2013).
Figure 1.8 Voula Papaioannou, Athens 1941–42, from Hellas 1941–1942,

the so-called ‘Black Album’
Marcel Junod, the International Red Cross (IRC) representative, who was
handed a hundred or so prints by Lykourezou, subsequently passed them on
to the IRC International Committee and various other institutions based
in Switzerland, as well as to British and American diplomats in Stockholm
(Papaioannou 2006: 20).
In 1943, when the worst of the crisis was over, Papaioannou and the fine-
art printer Yannis Kefallinos collaborated in the production of a hand-made
album which included 83 original prints glued onto sheets of black cardboard.
A total of four copies were produced, of which at least two have survived.
Entitled Hellas 1941–1942, it became known simply as ‘The Black Album’
(Fig. 1.8).
Figure 1.9 Kostas Balafas, ‘Aris and Sarafis’, 1944, from The Andartiko in Epirus
The ambiguities of photography
The history of the Greek resistance remains a heavily mined subject, still capable of
arousing strong emotions and ferocious partisanship. No real attempt has yet been
made at a dispassionate profit-and-loss accounting of the resistance’s activities with
a view to at least considering whether those activities proved, on balance, beneficial
or harmful to the nation. Nevertheless, few historians would deny that whatever
else it may have been, by the time of the German withdrawal from Greece, the
resistance had developed into the first act of a ruinous civil war; in other words, the
major resistance groups inevitably, and sooner rather than later, found themselves
in conflict with one another for ideological no less than for pragmatic reasons
(Margaritis 2001: 64).
Figure 1.10 Kostas Balafas, ‘The people admire them’, 1944, from The Andartiko
in Epirus
Of these groups, EAM/ELAS and its core constituent, the Communist Party
of Greece, were the best organised, the most highly motivated and disciplined, and
arguably possessed the closest thing to a long-term goal. As such, they were the
only group with both the resources and the will to propagandise their views and
activities. Propaganda by the deed was of course a basic policy of EAM/ELAS and
especially OPLA, EAM’s internal security organisation, but it was recognised that
the movement also needed to present its most positive and attractive face to the
world at large. Today, the heroic portraits of resistance fighters produced by Spyros
Meletzis have acquired iconic status. Unfortunately, we know very little about the
way in which imagery such as this was used and disseminated at the time. Meletzis
himself, writing in 1976, is scathing about the attitude of his superiors in the party:
‘I would be lying, however, if I were to claim that the leadership of the resistance
was aware of the contribution which an artist photographer could make. Nobody,
absolutely nobody in the photographic section paid the least attention. […] And so
they never took the initiative of giving me a specific assignment’ (Meletzis 1996: 21).
Nevertheless, these portraits, strongly echoing a style which might be described
as socialist sublime, have become firmly rooted in the iconography of the civil war.
Were they of a nature to appeal to any but true believers even at the time? Again,
this seems doubtful. Even today, in a far more cynical age, whether they are taken at
face value or read as an example of totalitarian kitsch not a million miles from North
Korean painting, still depends almost entirely on the viewer’s political sympathies.
That Meletzis was wholeheartedly prepared to subordinate his photography to
the requirements of the party, accepting not only subject matter but even firmly
expressed aesthetic directives, is made clear from the following astonishing passage,
in which Yannis Zevgos, a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee,
critiques his own portrait:
Look, Spyro, [he said]. Here you’ve captured what we were talking about, and more.
The whole stance shows a movement, an effort to march forward. In the clenching
of my facial muscles you see imprinted not just my own anguish, but that of the
people I express. But the most important thing in this photograph is the movement
and expression of my hand. Each of my fingers moves separately, but together they
represent a sum of forces which, assembled and disciplined in a general dynamic
arrangement, are ready for action (Meletzis 1996: 23–4).
The photographic medium is changeable, treacherous and even protean in its

nature. What was functional one day is artistic the next, what was truth yesterday is
falsehood tomorrow. What a photographer intends, what a photographer thinks he
sees is not necessarily what others will see in his photographs. Kostas Balafas was
another photographer who recorded the resistance, mostly from the side of EAM,
and though he too was a true believer, he rarely indulged in the overblown rhetoric
of Meletzis. His photographs are simpler, more direct and hence more convincing
than those of his lifelong rival; but he, too, was capable of fooling himself, of wilfully
misinterpreting the evidence before his eyes in favour of what he wanted to see.
A two-page spread (Figs 1.9 and 1.10) from his book Epirus illustrates the entry of
ELAS troops into Ioannina on 23 December 1944, following the defeat of the rival
EDES organisation (Balafas 1991: 210–11). The photograph on the left page shows
a close up of the resistance leaders Aris Velouhiotis and Stefanos Sarafis riding past
on black horses. The one on the right shows a crowd of about 28–30 men, women
and children presumably watching the riders; it has been captioned ‘The people
admire them’, consonant with EAM’s belief, and insistence upon, the fact that it
was invariably welcomed with open arms by ‘the people’. Even the most superficial
examination of the faces in the photograph, however, shows few signs of admiration,
but many of doubt, unease and even fear. That Balafas would have published this
photograph, let alone in this context, had he realised its true implications, is hard
to believe; the only possible explanation is that this highly experienced and skilful
photographer could not see what his own photograph showed, because he did not
wish to see it.
Coda
In the course of the century running from the 1840s to the end of the 1950s,
tempered by almost constant war and all too frequent civil conflict, Greek national
identity was slowly forged out of the disparate fragments which made up the
first post-revolutionary state. It had been a rough process, progressing by stops
and starts, and it was never easy, or indeed possible, to define precisely what that
identity consisted of; but like the Greek state itself, it was clear to all observers that
in spite of everything that fate and the Greeks themselves could do, it had come
into being. Like all national identities, it was woven of history, myth, experience
and yearning; like photography, it was and remains in flux, changing over time and
under the pressure of events.
During those crucial 100-odd years, photography played an active role in
defining, influencing and even at times directing that identity. In subsequent
decades, Greek introspection would crumble, and the narrow question of national
identity would give way to the search for an identity in the wider world, whether
in the context of one of the great international alliances or, more recently, that of a
pan-European association. But that is another story.
References
Arseni, K. (2004), Athens between the Wars through the Photographs of Petros Poulidis,
Athens: Commercial Bank of Greece.
Balafas, K. (1991), Το αντάρτικο στην Ήπειρο όπως το έζησε και το φωτογράφησε ο
Κώστας Μπαλάφας, Ioannina: n.p.
Balafas, K. (2003), Ήπειρος, Athens: Potamos.
Boudouri, I. (2003), ‘Η Μικρά Ασία του Henri-Paul Boissonnas’, in Henri-Paul
Boissonnas, Μικρά Ασία 1921, Athens: Idryma Meizonos Ellinismou, 35–51.
Bournova, E. (2006), ‘Deaths from Starvation, Athens, Winter of 1941–1942’;
http://www.social-history-of-modern-athens.gr/pdf/Deaths%20from%20
starvation%20E.BOURNOVA.pdf (accessed 10 August 2013).
Chapuisat, E. (1919), ‘Paroles prononcées a l’ouverture de l’exposition des Visions
de Grèce’, in La Grèce Immortelle, Geneva: Editions d’art Boissonnas, ix–xii.
Golombias, Y. (2004), ‘Ο φωτογράφος της Καστοριάς Λεωνίδας Παπάζογλου’, in
K. Antoniadis and Yorgos Golombias (eds), Λεωνίδας Παπάζογλου.
Φωτογραφικά πορτραίτα από την Καστοριά και την περιοχή της την περίοδο
του Μακεδονικού Αγώνα, Salonika: Mouseio Fotografias Thessalonikis, 9–15.
Holland, R. (2012), Blue-Water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean since 1800,
London: Allen Lane.
Karakasidou, A.N. (1997), Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in
Greek Macedonia 1870–1990, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Karambelas, N. (2002), ‘Σημείωμα του εκδότη’, in K. Vlahos, Η απελευθέρωση
της Ηπείρου: Α΄ Βαλκανικός Πόλεμος (1912–1913): φωτογραφικό λεύκωμα,
Preveza: Idryma Aktia Nikopolis, 9–11.
Katsiyannis, K. (2009), ‘Η εξέλιξη της τουριστικής πολιτικής στην Ελλάδα’; www.

atiner.gr/docs/2009Katsigiannis.doc (accessed 10 August 2013).
Llewellyn Smith, M. (1998), Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922,
London: Hurst & Company.
Makriyannis, I. (1964), Απομνημονεύματα, Y. Vlahoyannis (ed.), Athens: Estia.
Margaritis, G. (2001), Ιστορία του ελληνικού εμφυλίου πολέμου 1946–1949, vol. I,
Athens: Vivliorama.
Mazower, M. (1995), Inside Hitler’s Greece, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Meletzis, S. (1996), Με τους αντάρτες στα βουνά, Athens: n.p.
Nelly (1989), Αυτοπροσωπογραφία, E.H. Kasdaglis (ed.), Athens: n.p.
Papacosma, S.V. (1977), The Military in Greek Politics. The 1909 coup d’état, Kent,
Ohio: Kent State University Press.
Papaioannou, V. (2006), ‘Η Βούλα Παπαϊωάννου σε πρώτο πρόσωπο.
Αποσπάσματα από δύο ηχογραφημένες συνομιλίες’, in F. Konstantinou et al.
(eds), Η φωτογράφος Βούλα Παπαϊωάννου, Athens: Agra and Mouseio Benaki,
69–78.
Peckham, R.S. (2001), National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics
of Place in Greece, London: I.B. Tauris.
Stathatos, J. (1996), The Invention of Landscape: Greek Landscape and Greek
Photography, 1870–1995, Salonika: Camera Obscura.
Stathatos, J. (2008), ‘Μία μικρή δόση αθανασίας. Ο φωτογράφος των Κυθήρων’, in
J. Stathatos (ed.), Παναγιώτης Φατσέας: Πρόσωπα των Κυθήρων, 1920–1938,
Athens: Tetarto, 7–19.
Tloupas, T. (2005), Η Ελλάδα του Τάκη Τλούπα, Athens: Kapon and Mouseio
Benaki.
Trachtenberg, A. (2005), ‘Disfarmer and Heber Springs’, in Mike Disfarmer:
Original Disfarmer Photographs, Göttingen and New York: Steidl & Steven
Kasher Gallery, 17–21.
Varlas, M. (2003), ‘Η διεκδίκηση της Μικράς Ασίας από την Ελλάδα’, in Henri-Paul
Boissonnas, Μικρά Ασία 1921, Athens: Idryma Meizonos Ellinismou, 23–33.
Woodhouse, C.M. (1973), Capodistria: The Founder of Greek Independence, London:
Oxford University Press.
Woodhouse, C.M. (1977), Modern Greece. A Short History, London: Faber & Faber.
Papyros.
2
Greece as Photograph:
Histories, Photographies, Theories1
Alexandra Moschovi
In 1941 Alison Frantz and Lucy Talcott, archaeologists and members of the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens, published an illustrated book for
‘the benefit of civilian aid’ in occupied Greece. Not surprisingly, given the philhellene
rhetoric of the previous century with which the editors and their acolytes had been
nurtured, the modestly produced but not so modestly entitled publication This is
Greece proposed a black-and-white panorama that romanticised Greekness as an
idealisation of ancestral heritage. Contributed by 75 members of the School and
associated friends, the 140 photographs of ancient stones and Byzantine monuments,
of bucolic scenery and peasant life, of indigenous architecture and customs, of stern
priests and joyful girls in local costume that feature in the publication do not seem
to be informed by a uniform style of image-making, other than the enthusiasm and
curiosity of the amateur photographer. However, conceptually they seem to subscribe
to the same idea outlined in the brief introduction of the book that ‘in Greece past
and present [are] separated by no very wide gulf, whether in ideals of democracy
and independence or in the daily occupations of country people’ (Frantz and
Talcott 1941: n.p.). The editors’ knowledgeable ethnographic-in-style captions and
meticulous selection of ancient verses only aim to accentuate the above thesis in the
loosely organised thematic categories of the book.2 For instance, the caption under
1
The author would like to thank the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University,
USA for supporting her research in photographic representations of Greece in the post-war years
and associated literature kept in the Princeton University Collections, and more specifically, Dimitri
Gondicas for bringing rare material to her attention. This research project has also greatly benefited
from the invaluable insight of Aliki Tsirgialou and the team of the Photographic Archive of the Benaki
Museum, Athens. Thanks are also due to the Benaki Museum and the artists that kindly provided the
illustrations for this essay.
2
The sections of the book are outlined in the opening page as: mountains, valleys and plains,
harbours and islands, fortifications, ancient and medieval, village occupations, Athens today, Byzantine
churches and ancient sanctuaries (Frantz and Talcott 1941: n.p.).
53
the photograph of a Macedonian woman threshing notes: ‘In modern as in ancient

times threshing is done by means of a horse or ox-drawn sled, the tribola, a heavy
wooden slab, set with sharp stones for cutting the straw and separating the grain’
(Frantz and Talcott 1941: 77). On the following page, a more skilled photograph of
farmers winnowing somewhere in Corinth is accompanied by a verse selected from
Hesiod’s Work and Days (571–608): ‘Set your slaves to winnow Demeter’s holy grain,
when strong Orion first appears, on a smooth threshing floor in an airy place’ (Frantz
and Talcott 1941: 78). What Frantz and Talcott put together as a representative
image of Greece for circulation in Europe and the United States would be very
much the thematic norm of the mainstream tourist guides to be published in the
succeeding decades.
This chapter will argue that similar idea(l)s, thematic and/or morphological,
with those exemplified in Frantz and Talcott’s publication, not only informed the
ways that Greek photographers, amateurs and professionals, visualised Greece
and the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) of the Greek nation in the
post-war years, but would also constitute the point of ideological, conceptual and
aesthetic departure from imag(in)ing Greece ‘à ciel ouvert’ (Papaioannou 1953)
in the work of succeeding generations. Three distinct moments in the history of
Greek photography, the 1950s, the 1980s and the 2000s will be examined. This
chronological selection aims to show how photography, from a ‘nation-building
tool’ (Stimson 2006) that afforded iconic images of Greekness during the
political turbulence of the 1950s, would, following photography’s emancipation
as independent art in the 1980s and its fully-fledged institutionalisation in the
new millennium, challenge the preconceptions of collective consciousness about
national identity and associated motivations, historical narrative and factuality, and
even the most basic premises of realism itself.
‘This is Greece’
Burdening the history of modern Greece and feeding Europe’s philhellene

sentiments since the early nineteenth century, the belief in the continuity of
tradition in ‘the superior ideas of ancient Greeks found today in the character
of modern Greeks’ (Theodoropoulos 1959: 6) and the inseparability of ‘the two
Greeces – the ancient and the modern’ (Hunter 1947: viii) seemed uniformly to
underline the travel books and illustrated tourist guides that were published under
the oft-cited title This is Greece or similar titles in the late 1940s and 1950s, and
which rebranded Greece as a must-see destination for the educated European
traveller (Siegner 1955; Den Doolard 1958).
In his eloquent account of the history and literature of travel to Greece,
Travelers to an Antique Land (1991), Robert Eisner argued that what inspired
and urged the informed traveller to that ‘dry, rock-bound, seagrit landmass of the
imagination known as Hellas’, since about 1800, was on one hand, an emerging
‘bohemian enthusiasm for the primitive and the bizarre’, and on the other hand,
Greece as photograph 55
a growing sense of ‘estrangement from one’s own culture [that had] led to an
appreciation of peasant society in an extreme landscape’. The idea of Greece
as ‘a spiritual landscape’ that embodied both ‘wild beauty and antique wisdom’
was the perfect mouthpiece for the adventurous European intelligentsia that
would discover in the wilds of Greece and its well-hidden ancient treasures in
the mainland ‘a further range of experience beyond the classroom clichés’ (Eisner
1991: 1, 11, 13).
The antiquarian image of Greece as the eternal Arcadia, a seemingly

uninhabited land of great monuments and ancient stones was to become the
iconic representation of Greece throughout the nineteenth century, captured
photographically by well-off travellers, carrying the latest daguerreotype
equipment, who would stop in Greece on the Grand Tour to the Holy Land,
or by itinerant professional photographers producing topographic views for the
European market.3 Formulated within historically and socially specific discourses
and having an equally socially, and politically at times, determined currency,
travel literature and imagery, since their appearance in the mid-nineteenth
century, were by definition to describe and/or visualise the ‘otherness’ of a place
and its people. Thus, such publications were equally imbued by insignia of exotica
(Ryan 1997; Miclewright 2003). In the Western imaginary, Greece was long
inscribed as the mythic land, the eternal motherland of European civilisation
that could cater to the nostalgia for the mental and physical harmony that was
supposed to have existed in the ancient world. To this ‘system of attractions’,
which as a cultural process mediated between the nineteenth-century traveller/
tourist/foreigner and the indigenous ‘Other’ (McCannell 1999: 43) and ratified
the Greek monuments as ‘authentic’ sites of ultimate value, naturalism and
the authenticity of rural life would be added in the post-war years. For the
humanitarians who arrived in Greece in the mid-1940s and the adventurous
tourists who would visit shortly after, the country’s seemingly ‘uncivilised
nature’ offered in the guise of the pastoral bliss and simplicity of peasant life
a utopian retreat from the hardships of the war and the current state of affairs
(Moschovi 2010: 92). ‘There lives a people who seem to have preserved that old
world freshness and who still live the natural life with little heed or knowledge
of the world beyond’, the writer Isobel Hunter noted enthusiastically in her
1949 travel book This is Greece (53). And A. Den Doolaard, another travel writer,
would affirm almost a decade later: ‘The Greek believes in happiness through
simplicity, a kitchen chair in the shadow of a summer house, a drop of “ouzo”
and a long glass of water, a quiet game of trick-track and heated argument with
3
This stereotypical image would be adopted by native nineteenth-century photographers
as well. Constantin Athanasiou, Dimitris Costantinou, Petros Moraites, the Romaides Brothers, to
mention but the most prominent ones, concentrated primarily on depictions of the antiquities and
regional costume studies largely neglecting indigenous modern life, elements of which were only
occasionally imprinted as punctuation in the landscape or indicators of scale. For a detailed analysis of
this period in the history of Greek photography, see Tsirgialou 2009.
friends. And this new Greece too, has a message for the world: how man can
make much out of little, by observing moderation in everything – except, that
is, in the joy of living’ (1958: 5).
This emphasis on simplicity of lifestyle, imposed by poverty rather than
choice, but which translated in the eyes of Western tourists as ‘the carefree
and simple joie de vivre of the Greeks’ (Den Doolaard 1958: 43) was among
the emblematic insignia of Greek otherness which along with the people’s
physiognomic features and idiosyncratic character would feed the popular

commonplace about modern Greece promoted in mainstream travel literature.
Although publications in the late 1950s attempted to provide a more modern
image of the country, showcasing ‘linear avenues, large public parks, swarms
of taxi cabs, comfortable hotels and a metropolitan activity which continues
undiminished far into the night’ in Athens, they nonetheless warned the reader
about the lack of modern infrastructure and comforts that a civilised Westerner
may take for granted at home and elsewhere (Siegner 1955: n.p.).
The visual landmarks that became synonymous with Greece and Greekness
in this western-oriented popular imaginary seem to be fairly standardised
among tourist publications centering around geography, local history, arts and
crafts, ancient civilization and people. The slopes of Mount Olympus, olive
groves in the Peloponnese, plains in Thessaly, stone bridges in Epiros, the
temple at Delphi and the Lion Gate in Mycenae, Epidaurus and the Acropolis,
chapels, churches and monasteries in Mistra, Meteora and Mount Athos,
cobbled streets on Aegean islands and folk architecture in Macedonia, farmers
threshing, fishermen on their caiques, and village women spinning al fresco, but
also kebab shops and dance halls in Athens and Piraeus, shoeshine boys, sponge
and sesame-roll sellers, men drinking coffee or playing backgammon at busy
outdoor cafes, are some of the oft-cited themes in these publications.4 Informed
by foreign expectations, old fashioned philhellenism, cultural imperialism and
middle-class tourist imagination – what has been locally identified as the
‘Western gaze’ (Panayotopoulos 2009) – the pictorial physiognomy outlined
above would also constitute the undeviating rhetoric of Greekness for Greek
audiences that would be circulated in the post-war years through the new
illustrated press and state tourist publications as the visual epitome of national
identity.5
4
Not exhaustive in any way, this list of themes and patterns has been compiled taking as case
studies the following publications: Frantz and Talcott 1941; Hunter 1947; Greek Office of Information
1949; Siegner 1955; and Den Doolaard 1958.
5
For an analysis of the construction of the mythic national landscape of Greece since the
nineteenth century, see Stathatos 1996.
‘La Grèce à ciel ouvert’
The ‘re-invention’ of the Greek countryside in the inter-war years by middle-class

Greek urbanites, who joined the newly-formed hiking clubs, was not simply associated
with the naturalist movement and excursionism that had already swept Europe.6 As
I have argued elsewhere, the local fascination with the Greek rustic landscape and
all naive aspects of peasant life was equally ‘part of the re-conceptualisation of the
country’s ethnic and cultural identity in line with the logic of – and aspiring to – the
unification of disparate migrant populations from Asia Minor, [whereby] a return to
the ancient Greek fundaments and the idea of a romanticised Arcadia […], though
seemingly neutral politically, would actually reinforce national (not to say nationalist)
consciousness and patriotic unity (Moschovi 2009a: 54). Such ideologically intricate
sentiments and pursuits are evident in the work of professionals and amateurs alike:
commissioned by the Hellenic Ministry of Tourism, Elli Sougioutzoglou-Seraidari
(widely known as Nelly) attempted in the 1930s to evidence the physiognomic
continuity of the race by juxtaposing images of peasantry with photographs of
classical sculpture (Konstantinou and Boudouri 1993), whereas the new breed of
amateur photographers of the inter-war years – namely, Dimitris Letsios, Takis
Tloupas, Maria Chroussaki, Ellie Papadimitriou, and Giorgos Vafiadakis among
others – would turn to the countryside to recover a sense of stability in the diachronic
values of folkloric tradition.
As the post-civil war wave of urbanisation and emigration devastated the
provinces in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Greek photographers would return,
time and again, to the countryside to record folk culture and local customs before
they disappeared. Founded in 1952 and comprising professionals and amateur
photographers – Dimitris Harissiadis, Spyros Meletzis, Takis Tloupas, Voula
Papaioannou, Maria Chroussaki, Kostas Balafas and Dimitris Letsios among
others – the Hellenic Photographic Society aimed to promote Greek photography
and Greece as an attractive tourist destination (Papakyriakou 1954). This second
endeavour, contextualised within the turbulent political climate of the period as well
as debates around nationalism, patriotism and national identity, explains the strictly
Hellenocentric and folklorist orientation of the photographic blue-print advocated
in the pages of the Society’s magazine, Elliniki Fotografia and which wavered
between the ‘popular picturesque’ (Bourdieu 1984) and romantic sentimentality
typical of amateur club practice. This thematic consensus does not mean that its
photo-enthusiasts did not lay claims to individual artistic expression: numerous
articles and lectures by established members extolled the creative genius, technical
virtuosity and the perceptive ‘eye’ of the gifted photographer, qualities which would
also constitute the cornerstone of photography’s modernist re-interpretation a
decade later (Szarkowski 1966). The ideological premises of modernist thinking
may be likewise traced in the treatment of photography as universal visual language,
6
For a discussion of the relation between inter-war excursionism and the developing interest in
folkloric tradition, see Papaioannou 2005.
a stance that closely followed the period’s fascination with ‘photography’s mythical
modernist promise of mechanically realised democracy’, as Blake Stimson would
put it (2006: 24). The belief in a unifying universal humanism – the great post-war
utopian project that Edward Steichen propagated with his notorious 1955 MoMA
exhibition The Family of Man – was also adopted by the predominantly middle-
class Hellenic Photographic Society, but this was cloaked in a ‘folksy’ humanism that
purposely silenced the period’s social problems and pathologies.
Similarly normative, aesthetic and ideological, concerns are evident in the work of
two of the most prominent members of the Society, Voula Papaioannou and Dimitris
Harissiadis, who were both professionally involved in the depiction of the country’s
reconstruction after the war; the former being formally employed by the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the immediate
period after the war, and later by AMAG (American Mission for Aid in Greece) and
ECA/Greece (Economic Cooperation Administration), and the latter commissioned,
in the late 1950s, to illustrate the results of the implementation of the Marshall Plan.7
As the director of UNRRA’s Photographic Department in Greece, Papaioannou
would document all aspects of the organisation’s relief aid mission, from the first
shipments of supplies arriving at Greek ports to the dissemination of foodstuffs and
clothes to beneficiaries in cities and the provinces, but also the reconstruction of
the agro-industrial areas of the economy and the training of the population in new
technologies and skills. Her photographs of her tour with UNRRA teams to the Greek
countryside were commissioned to document the organisation’s relief operations in
war-afflicted areas in Northern Greece, Epirus, the Peloponnese, and Crete (Fig. 2.1).
At the same time, they suggested through ‘indisputable’ photographic evidence
that peasant populations had their immediate needs met and were gradually
reclaiming their daily routine despite the provinces being severely afflicted by the civil
unrest. Under UNRRA’s strict guidelines, Papaioannou’s visual narrativisation of the
country’s condition had to communicate a very clear message: that reconstruction
had already started in Greece and people were grateful for UNRRA’s aid.8 Skilfully
synthesised to emphasise the dramatic dimension of the situation and carefully
captioned, her images of burnt villages and bombarded infrastructure, of desperate
people in town and country queuing for the distribution of clothes, of emaciated
toddlers in hospitals receiving medical treatment or school children in tatters being
fed in open-air soup kitchens with UNRRA supplies, were specifically selected as
illustrative of the necessity of the aid for the organisation’s press releases.9
7
For detailed accounts of Papaioannou’s and Harissiadis’s life and work, see Konstantinou 2006
and Imsiridou 2009, respectively.
8
For a description of the brief behind UNRRA’s photographic mission in the Greek countryside
and the manipulation this entailed, see Carter 2006. For further imagery depicting relief aid in Greece
in the mid 1940s, see also Vervenioti 2009.
9
See for instance, Papaioannou’s image Food-distribution No. 1459 accompanied by the caption
‘School is over and this is dinner hour. Thanks to UNRRA these children of the burnt village of Asprangeli
enjoy at least one meal a day’, S-0800-0013-14-3, UNRRA Archive, United Nations Archives, New York.
Figure 2.1 Voula Papaioannou, Men following a tractor, being trained in its use,
1945–46
Yet, Papaioannou’s albums Hellas (Istituto Geographico De Agostini, 1949)

and subsequent publications La Grèce à ciel ouvert (Clairfontaine/Guilde du
Livre, 1952) and Iles Grecques (Clairfontaine/Guilde du Livre, 1956) seem to tell
a different story, one that specifically targeted foreign audiences (and publishers).
Continuing her interwar preoccupation with the photographic depiction
of ancient and medieval heritage (Konstantinou 2006), Papaioannou would
combine anew these two periods with contemporary views of Greece taken
during her tour of the countryside before and after the war, whereby ancient
columns, epic mountainous vistas and atmospheric seascapes, sun-blasted
Aegean houses and idyllic rustic scenes would be interchanged and contrasted
with romanticised images of country life, from peasants and fishermen in situ,
to close-ups of local types, arts and crafts, and juxtaposed with ancient verses,
as was the case in Frantz and Talcott’s This is Greece publication. This pictorial
mosaic of nature, monuments and people, of heritage, tradition and idealised
simple, everyday life would become, through the channels of the Greek National
Tourist Organisation, the country’s exportable image in the 1950s and 1960s.
Similar thematic and conceptual disjunctions are also to be found between
Harissiadis’s professional work and ‘amateur’, as he called it, practice. Indeed,

Harissiadis’s industrial photographs of the 1950s – the building of the IZOLA
factory and the Aliveri power plant, the rebuilding of the port of Piraeus, the
infrastructure works on the river Louros, to mention but a few of the projects
he documented – tenaciously accentuated the industrial form to the point of
the monumental. This epic image of the country’s rapid reconstruction was
in tune with the bigger picture that post-war Greek governments aimed to
promote at home and abroad to secure the country’s economic viability in the
post-war years of rehabilitation. Harissiadis was specifically commissioned by
the Ministry of Reconstruction to record major public works in the country’s
post-war rehabilitation (Imsiridou 2009). The same spirit of post-war optimism,
of progress and modernisation is exuded in the series of photographs produced
in 1957 to illustrate the results of 10 years of the implementation of the Marshall
Plan across the country (Fig. 2.2). Like Papaioannou, Harissiadis, a conscientious
professional who worked with several foreign organisations operating in Greece
after the war, endeavoured to meet the commission briefs to the letter. Thus
his photographs unmistakably highlight the signs of industrialisation that
punctuated the rural landscape, whilst he carefully staged smiling workers and
villagers seemingly au naturel, that is, as if they were caught unaware of being
observed, to illustrate the propagandised feeling of euphoria as much as the
people’s gratitude to their benefactors.
For both Papaioannou and Harissiadis, whether working for relief
organisations or the Hellenic Tourism Organisation campaigns and illustrated
magazines later, this clarity and efficacy in conveying the message was achieved
by maximising the pictorial immediacy and realist effect of the photographs.
Careful lighting and composition of the dramatised scenes, arrangement of
subjects and props, even re-enactment and staging were invariably employed.
Nonetheless, these techniques of construction and manipulation of the medium’s
indexicality did not seem to affect, even when these were overtly obvious, the
‘naturalness’ and ‘truth value’ of the images, which were considered then, as
much as now, part and parcel of their use value as historical documents. This
idiomatic perception of authenticity and realism, which had characterised
social documentary photography at large since the 1930s (Stott 1973; Bezner
2000), was also a consequence of the inevitable cultural distance that both
photographers had from rural folk and working class populations, mainly owing,
it can be argued, to their class habitus as middle-class city-dwellers. Although
Papaioannou always retained a more empathetic stance towards her subjects,
Figure 2.2 Dimitris Harissiadis, Factory, Thessaly and Western Macedonia,

June 1957
Harissiadis consciously remained a more detached observer keeping a physical

and ideological distance from people, historical events and the politics of the day
(Balafas 1995), as his preoccupation with contemporary social reality throughout
his career was in effect anthropological rather than humanistic (Moschovi 2005).
Even so, in his ‘amateur’ practice, Harissiadis did succumb to the Hellenocentric
folklore advocated by the circle of the Hellenic Photographic Society. The strictly
black-and-white photographs that he selected for the Society’s publications and
members-only exhibitions, or submitted to international photographic salons,
are far from the official image of growth and progress that he helped formulate:
sunsets over enticing bays and atmospheric mountain views, sunsoaked caiques
and fishermen at sea, local architecture and bucolic landscapes, farmers with
donkeys and women in local costume; in short, cheerful and simple images that
were conceptually and aesthetically easily accessible to culturally heterogeneous

audiences, with a pinch of exoticism for those international viewers and a light,
romantic sentiment, which, time and again, was not far from the stereotypical
qualities that characterised amateur club photography at the time.10 At a time
of political transition, economic uncertainty and social hardships, this recourse
to nature and tradition perhaps offered those photographers a seemingly neutral
platform for self-expression. However, it would not be until the late 1970s that
this amateur, and somewhat ‘plain’, preoccupation with the medium’s formal and
representational qualities would be critically addressed as the newly emergent genre
of creative photographic practice would mature and be gradually professionalised
in Greece.
The 1950s were a time when a deep-seated belief in the single uniform vision
for political being, collective experience and national identification remained
unchallenged. Coupled with the overwhelming successive changes in the political
landscape, the aspiration for economic prosperity and the consumerist dream
of the West, the emergence of mass culture and the new social consciousness of
the expanded middle-classes that marked the 1960s and 1970s would gradually
weaken these modernist certainties, giving way, as we shall see, to postmodernist
relativities in and around representation and identity.
Towards a ‘post-classical landscape’
It has been often argued that Greek photography in the 1960s and early
1970s, that is, until the advent of what Stathatos in 1997 termed ‘New Greek
Photography’, was afflicted by ‘artistic isolation’ and ‘lack of any critical
awareness’ (Stathatos 1997: xxxi). The polarisation of photography between the
self-perpetuating yet obsolete joie-de-vivre iconography of amateur practice
on one side, and the blunt matter-of-factness of professional practice on the
other, both by definition politically disengaged and uncritical, ushered in the
relegation of photography to the distant outskirts of the Greek visual arts. The
lack of infrastructure and a market offering support to photographic practice,
as well as educational institutions and journals that could create the discursive
ground for an indigenous ‘thinking photography’ (Burgin 1982), would only be
slowly catered for in the late 1980s and 1990s, thus delaying photography’s fully-
fledged institutionalisation as art in Greece.
The new generation of photographers that came of age in the mid-1970s had
returned to Greece after studying or working abroad, in Great Britain, France and
the United States. They clustered under the roof of the newly founded Photographic
Centre of Athens, which would become the main hub for the emerging genre
of ‘creative’ photography. This novel practice was, it was claimed, to fill the void
10
See for instance Reitz 1949; Yerassopoulos 1956; Meletzopoulos 1957. For a further analysis
of the aesthetic qualities of Harissiadis’s body of work, see Moschovi 2009b.
between ‘the visual self-satisfying delirium’ of the amateurs, as one photographer

put it (Panayotopoulos 1979: 495), and the triviality of commercial applied practice.
Beyond the hobby-cum-art practice of the preceding generation, the ‘popular
picturesque’ and tourist folklore outlined above, ‘creative’ photography was defined
and rehearsed as an independent artform that was to be evaluated and practised
according to its own particularities, that is, attesting to its very ‘photographicness’,
as a ‘visual art of difficulty and singularity’ (Antoniadis 1996: 13).
It comes as no surprise that within the context of what was for the time a
rather retrogressive emphasis on medium specificity and self-containment,
which unmistakably echoed John Szarkowski’s 1960s modernist definition
of ‘photography itself ’ (1966), a new type of documentary photography was
to become prevalent as the purely photographic genre par excellence. It was
Szarkowski’s reading of documentary photography as art in the late 1960s that
would propagate a personalised type of documentary, centred upon the ‘belief that
the commonplace is really worth looking at’ and, most importantly for the time
being, ‘with a minimum of theorising’ (Szarkowski 1967). As Allan Sekula wrote
in 1979, ‘Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to
the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-
expression on the part of the artist’ (173–4).
Under the light of the new exhibition value attributed to documentary in
the museum/gallery space in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in the
United States, ‘the boringly sociological’, which the modernist institution had
long excluded, became ‘the excitingly mythological/psychological’, an amalgam
of ‘exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting
and careerism’, Martha Rosler observed in retrospect (1989: 307, 306). As the
foundations of the universal grand narratives of the left and the communal
ideals that had supported political photography in the 1970s began to be shaken
under the burden of the neoliberal laissez-faire doctrines that appeared in the
Western world, namely in the United States and Britain, so did faith in the
power of photography as social testimony and instrument of political pressure
and reform. As such, documentary would gradually grow into an expressionist,
socially concerned, but no longer overtly political factographic genre. This change
of consciousness in documentary practice would be described more animatedly by
practitioners themselves as a shift from something that is out there into something
much more esoteric (Graham 1996). Despite this essentialising emphasis on
medium-specific qualities, the problematisation of Greek practitioners around
the premises of photography as representation in the 1980s followed closely the
postmodern critique of realism as well as the concurrent legitimisation of multiple
subjectivities and forms of political being.11
11
On the postmodern critique of photographic realism, see Barthes 1977; Burgin 1982a and
1982b; Tagg 1982 and 1997.
These complexities, which I have described elsewhere as the ‘(in)decisive

moment of Greek photography’,12 are manifest in the re-conceptualisation of both
documentary and street photography in the 1980s. The illusion of the ‘unobserved
observer’ that authenticated the often-orchestrated document in the 1950s and
1960s, and which was to be the conceptual cornerstone of the flourishing street
photography of the 1970s, was ardently challenged. Therefore, although chance and
instantaneity were still paramount in the latter, the ‘naturalness’ of the seemingly
snatched moment was undermined by an openly confrontational approach that

acknowledged not only awareness on the part of the photographed subjects, but also
the act of photographing as mediation, as Eleni Maligoura’s colour series Omonoia
Square (1987–96) verifies: the night birds inhabiting the square, the street vendors,
the kiosk owners, the sex workers and the homeless are posed frontally and staring
directly at the lens, ironically emulating the nineteenth-century anthropological
manner of depicting exotic folk.
Towards this direction, the accentuated low viewpoint and use of flash in
Periklis Alkidis’s earlier series Carnival (1982) initiated a distinctively aggressive
photographic method that was also concurrently explored by the proponents of the
New British Documentary, primarily Martin Parr and Paul Reas, as a reaction to the
canonical programme of social documentary photography. The act of taking these
photographs is equally reflected upon the expression of the no longer unsuspecting
or posed passers-by returning the gaze of the camera operator, thus subverting
the pseudo-naturalism of the folkloric ethnographic record. In the same vein,
Stelios Efstathopoulos’s study on lived experience and the everyday showcases an
overtly intrusive approach. In the series Everyday Portraits (1989), in which city
streets are treated as the stage-set upon which small stories of daily urban life
unfold, the idiomatic perspective of the wide-angle lens and the grainy film follow
the fluidity of the poetics of the everyday. The blurry form of a close-up portrait
against a detailed background acknowledges, by capitalising on an intrinsically
photographic repertoire, the multiple subjectivities (of the photographer, the
photographed subject and the viewer) inscribed in the photographic record.
Another point of departure from the ideological mainstays of the previous
generation was the zealous rejection of folksy humanism, the kitsch (in the sense
of popular) ‘pictorialism’ and romantic sentiment that fed amateur imagination.
Photographers were now in search of Greece’s ‘post-classical landscape’, as Stathatos
put it in 1988, a quest that would find expression in what was being elsewhere
formulated under the banner of ‘social landscape photography’:13 that is, socially
12
The ‘in’ is bracketed as a pun to Henri Cartier Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’. For further
analysis, see Moschovi 2003.
13
Referring to the work of the British documentarist Paul Graham, Gerry Badger described this
new breed of photographers as ‘social landscapists’ using the term Nathan Lyons introduced in the late
1960s to state that they tackled social issues ‘concentrating upon what might be termed the subtext
instead of the main plot’, and suggested that ‘their work, though broadly socially oriented’ could not be
seen as ‘political with a capital P’ (Badger 1987: n.p.).
Figure 2.3 Nikos Panayotopoulos, Untitled, from the Chapels series (1978–88),
original in colour
Source: © Nikos Panayotopoulos, courtesy of the artist
engaged practice that dealt with society and everyday life without making grand
political statements. Instrumental to this shift was the discrediting of modernist
narratives and in particular the nostalgic vision of universal humanism and the political
passions fuelled by socialism or nationalism in the previous decades. Photographers
consciously departed from the idea of a single, nationally-defined vision towards
multiple, relative, personalised narratives and the ‘exploration of their immediate
environment, that is, in most cases, the metropolitan city’ (Stathatos 1997: liii). As
such, tradition and the thematic and aesthetic modalities of what may be termed
‘picturesque’ in the old rhetoric of Greekness described above were either completely
rejected, as was the case in the blossoming street photography of the period that
focused exclusively on urban experience, or critically revisited and deconstructed.
Nikos Panayotopoulos’s Chapels series (1978–88) is a case in point (Fig. 2.3).

His photographs of isolated chapel interiors that punctuate the Greek
countryside afford us a colourful dismantling of traditional religious rituals and
the picturesque-cum-naive qualities associated with folk craft and architecture.
The eerie atmosphere and sense of timelessness of these shrines are violently
interrupted by contemporary utilitarian objects that would normally have been
removed from the frame of the conscientious travel photographer: a metal
receptacle of oil is left in a corner to rust, whilst a cardboard box becomes

a makeshift candle holder. Panayotopoulos’s subsequent series with the
incongruous title Common Imaginary Places (1989) presents a cross-section
of the urban commonplace, the visual antithesis of rural harmony and beauty
sought for in the previous decades, and points to views which, albeit constituting
a part of contemporary urban daily life, have not previously been represented
photographically, being considered boring, ugly, or chaotic. Panayotopoulos
resolutely depicts the non-photogenic aspect of the urban everyday: a bus at a
crossroads, an unidentified urban site, some nondescript architecture, common
places that become, despite their triviality, uncommon, almost imaginary when
photographed. This conscious departure from the rural picturesque is further
accentuated by the grainy, blurry and distorted surface of the black-and-white
picture taken by means of a low-quality plastic camera and then exaggeratedly
enlarged to deconstruct the act of photographing and the nature of photography
as representation. The latter decision also aims to undermine the belief of the
previous generation in the veracity of photography as a transparent window on
the world. This use of blurredness as abstraction and critique of realism has now,
in the heyday of digital technologies, been rediscovered by contemporary artists
working with photographic media (Westgeest and Van Gelder 2010: 59–63).
The debates around the status of social being, the disjunction of the idealised
old and the vulgar new in contemporary Greece, as well as the truth value of
photographic representation at large, were also critically explored in Kostis
Antoniadis’s series Used Photographs (1986). Long before digital technologies
made this feasible at the press of a button, Antoniadis substituted scenes of
everyday life for the posters of advertising billboards. Yet, the new multi-
storey apartment buildings, the few remnants of old town-houses and the
urban voids that make up the stage set in his photographs compose a rather
grim scenery of alienation, nostalgia for the past and anxiety for the future.
These sentiments are in sheer contrast with the glamorous world propagated by
the booming 1980s consumerist culture and lifestyle in the advertising posters
he erased. Antoniadis combined different genres (i.e. landscape, portrait and
street photography) and approaches to photography (merging the ‘taking’ and
the ‘making’ methodologies). Skilfully concealed behind technical virtuosity,
these interventions are discerned only retrospectively on a second level of
reading the image, when one starts to wonder what these posters could possibly
stand for.
If one were to summarise the conceptual characteristics of the ‘New Greek

Photography’ of the 1980s, one could say that this was defined in relation –
by the very act of negation – to past practice: namely the re-invention of the
pastoral and ‘classical’ tradition as part of the post-war attempt towards the
visualisation of a uniform national identity. It was equally responsive to efforts
by the state, after the restoration of democracy in the mid-1970s, to establish
an appealing modern image of the country in Europe. The disassociation of the
personality from homogenising social identification and the commonplaces of

national identity also shifted the emphasis from social content and the vehicular
role of photography to the formation of collective vision towards a self-reflexive
interpretation of the medium per se and its premises as representation. The
programme of a photographic realism that was unadulterated by non-medium-
specific interventions, the insular theorisation of photography in relation to
the unique phenomena of the chemical and photomechanical laws that govern
its nature and its Barthesian ‘having-been-there’ indexicality would singularly
inform the developing photographic discourse in Greece for more than two
decades (Antoniadis 1995).
An imaginary topos
In the past decade or so, the axiom of the ‘photographicness’ of photography

itself and the premises of photographic realism have been revisited, only this
time with a subversive intent. Owing much to postmodern liberalism, which
facilitated – if it did not provoke – the transgression and cross-fertilisation of
disciplines, genres, practices, media and styles, as well as to the development of
an infrastructural framework of educational institutions, museums and galleries
supporting photography as independent art, Greek photographers have been
eventually disentangled from the old trammels of photographic etiquette and
pedigree. Photography’s ‘expanded’ (and constantly expanding) field of operations
(Osborne 2003) has offered a new terrain on which to reconsider and adjust set
ideas about medium-specificity and realism as the advent of digital technologies
has made space, time and reality more elastic than ever.
The recent shift of contemporary practice, in Greece and elsewhere, towards
the simulation of the realism of the real, whether achieved through staging,
re-enactment or digital manipulation, or a combination of all these strategies,
also reflects contemporary photographers’ increasing apprehension with the
artificiality – virtuality more precisely – of contemporary social experience.
What we tend to look at nowadays, liberated from the moral value long
attributed to photography’s truthfulness, significantly departs, ideologically and
morphologically, from previous practice and the ‘tyranny of the analogy’ (Durand
2003). This is what I have elsewhere described as a ‘delicate balance between
reality and artifice, event and non-event, chance and performance, index and
digital forgery’ that questions the very notion of realism as much as the nature
of the real and the possibility of truthfulness by affording us with a ‘truer than
life itself picture’ (Moschovi 2009c: 7). The abundance of visual information that
both the view camera and recent digital advancements make possible to register
onto the surface of the image, what Julian Stallabrass has termed ‘Data Sublime’
(2007), accentuates the ‘hyperreal’ nuance of this novel type of photographic
verisimilitude.
The turn of a number of contemporary Greek practitioners to a kind of
‘urban pastoral’ located within and at the edges of the city, the in-between,
‘man-altered’ landscapes ( Jenkins 1975) at its margins, the pictorially neglected
areas of the Greek countryside, the unrecorded utilitarian landscapes and
wastelands, reflects a number of propositions and/or oppositions. On one hand,
this persistent investigation of the interface of the natural and the cultural
indicates a problematisation on the current state of people’s relationship
to the natural environment, which, in the case of Greece, is constantly and
uncontrollably violated, as both Yiorgis Yerolymbos and Paris Petridis remind
us in Terza Natura (2004) and Notes at the Edge of the Road (2006) respectively.
Yerolymbos’s and Petridis’s photographic travelogues across the country become
journeys of self-exploration picturing how the tension between nature and
culture is presently internalised by contemporary city dwellers. On the other
hand, this shift signals, time and again, a conscious deviance from the tourist
stereotypes of sights and areas of natural beauty as well as from the promotion of
Greece as a party island to attract different crowds of tourists looking for budget
holidays in the sun. This is pursued by pointing the camera at or recreating
what is usually left out of the frame in commercial representations, so as to
capture the everydayness and mundaneness of these landscapes. For instance,
Petros Efstathiadis’s staged portraits of his family and folk in his home village
in Northern Greece reveal, behind a make-shift photo-booth hanging clumsily
on a washing line, the non-picturesque village house, vegetable crates, grazing
hens, and gardening equipment. Made of low-life found objects and debris
that complement the portraits in his Liparo series (2008–12), his impromptu
in situ interventions and absurd installations – The Bar, The Rain Machine,
The Racing Ring, The Phone Booth – consciously inject the imaginary and the
uncanny into the non-photogenic triviality of country life that animates the
nondescript landscape (Fig. 2.4). What these ironic recreations imply is not
simply a self-referential, medium-specific questioning of what may be termed
photographable, but also a political concern with the desolation of the Greek
countryside.
Similarly, Nikos Markou’s socially informed topography of vernacular
landscape of the past 15 years, from the series Gaio-metries (1993–96) and
Cosmos (1996–99) to the most recent one Topos (2009), undermines, through
a process of re/deconstruction, the old pictorial traditions of idealised beauty
and unadorned nature both in terms of aesthetics and as a cultural construct.
He suggests that wherever we look, the landscape is merely a product of technical
civilisation: the concrete constructions in the middle of nowhere, the abandoned,
Figure 2.4 Petros Efstathiadis, ‘Bar’, 2010, from the series Liparo (2008–12),
original in colour
Source: © Petros Efstathiadis, courtesy of the artist
weed-infested petrol pumps, the discarded household appliances and other items
that have lost their use-value, hint at his enduring interest in the declining state
of the regions, examining progress and dereliction in parallel, and juxtaposing
the atmospheric with the chaotic and the desolate. His idea of an anti-landscape
composed out of elements urban and industrial, real and imaginary, points to a
different kind of sublime, one that is tenaciously detached from the modernist
interpretation of Nature-as-God and which opposes, and eventually collapses,
the idea of the country’s romanticised mythical national landscape. Markou
purposefully assimilates the vocabulary of Romanticism and the bright colours
of advertising imagery combined with contemporary notions of the ‘popular
picturesque’. As such, these photographs not only re-evaluate what the consumer
society considers worthless when its use-value has passed, but, like John Stathatos’s
recent series Air, Waters, Places (2009), they debase beauty and sensuality by
deliberately aestheticising elements of the decayed and the mundane, forcing upon
us a deadpan and, at times, cruel realism.
Another point of divergence from previous practice is a preoccupation with
existential issues, one which often finds refuge and resolution in the countryside
away from the immediate urban environment. In this context, the landscape
acquires a much more personal resonance and use, being seen as a terrain
to investigate the individual identity rather than a unifying element in the
pursuit of a collective national one. Panos Kokkinias’s series Landscapes (2000)
exemplifies this direction. A hybrid that combines the conventionalities of lush,
epic landscape photography with directorial practice, this series exudes a feeling
of alienation from nature and self as estranged city-dwellers perform seemingly
incomprehensible acts in the open air. As the photographer explains, the driving
force behind the making of the series was to examine ‘the discomfort of modern
man within the natural environment’ (2012: 123). In his most recent series Leave
Your Myth in Greece (2011), the existential anguish that stems from and reflects
this alienation from nature is matched with an equal anxiety about the country’s
current social and political developments (Fig. 2.5). Reinterpreting ideas about
the Greek ‘psyche’ and their pictorial stereotypes, Kokkinias implants his tragic
figures in carefully composed rural stage sets whose colourfulness and luridness
purposefully provide a contrasting background for the grey despair of the
protagonists: a woman with a toddler and baby standing treacherously at the edge
of a cliff; a man in traditional evzone costume floats – asleep or dead, we have
no way of knowing – in mid sea; an old man reaches out to water a lonely tree
in the middle of a dry no-man’s land. Equally, the technical and morphological
lucidity of the pictures stands out against their semantic ambiguity, and so is our
attempt to demythologise what is proposed as mythical.14
It is this imaginary topos, located in the overlapping spaces among reality,
artifice and the self, that is proposed as the contemporary interpretation of
the meta-modern, meta-‘post-classical’ landscape in current photographic
imaginings of Greece. Considerations about national identity, as this was
reformulated in the 1990s against the new geopolitical landscape in Europe and
the political circumstances at home, and infiltrated into public consciousness
through an overwhelmingly dominant mass culture, take on a different turn
as artists pursue a more globalised, transnational identity. Having, more often
than not, studied or lived outside the country’s borders, this younger generation
of photographers has developed a different – some say emotionally detached
or nonchalant, others deem this more critical – relation to the locus and spirit
of Greekness. Even the classification of ‘Greek photography’ as a national
school in recent attempts to present contemporary practice as a coherent
whole may seem redundant as the references contemporary practitioners
employ can no longer be clearly traced to a single, national or other, school
or discipline, style or source. Adopting and adapting elements from various
photographic traditions (such as making and taking, staging and manipulating
photographs), media (analogue and digital) and disciplines (with loans from
painterly, performative and sculptural practices) on a single, seemless pictorial
14
The title of the series paraphrases the proposition ‘Live Your Myth in Greece’ that was the title
of an oft-cited TV commercial of the National Tourist Organisation in 2008.
Figure 2.5 Panos Kokkinias, ‘Prespes’, from the series Leave Your Myth in Greece
(2011), detail, original in colour
Source: © Panos Kokkinias, courtesy of the artist
surface, Kokkinias, Yerolymbos, Markou, and Efstathiadis create pictures whose

meaning and function is highly layered. This type of imaging has been termed
‘multimediating’, whereby the prefix ‘multi’ is not employed to refer simply to
the expansion of a medium’s field of operations, but rather ‘highlights that,
by definition, mediation renders direct views of the “real world” impossible’
(Westgeest and Van Gelder 2011: 53). And it is this critique of photography as
a mediating device that these photographers target by proposing a ‘hyperreal’
realism.
The impetus in 1950s amateur and professional practice behind visualising
– and mythologising – the nation’s ‘imagined community’, that is, the ideas of
nation-ness and the generalised affinities that may stand for one’s culturally
constructed sense of community and national identity (Anderson 1983),
gave way in the 1980s to an engagement with the politics of ethnicity that
aimed to deconstruct those narratives of home-grown nationalism. This was
the time when photographers moved away from the ideal of the ‘classical’
landscape, its ideological paraphernalia and the recognition of things associated
with national identification. They turned to their immediate environment,
to contemporary reality and factuality to demystify social connections and
critically challenge the social and national myths that had been constructed
in the previous decades. They did so by exploring the capabilities and
limits of the document as representation. At the dawn of the twenty-first
century, the widespread dismay with contemporary social pathologies and
impoverished collective imagination have ushered in a shift from this lived
sociality to lived individuality. This individuality may find expression, or better
refuge, in an imaginary personalised topos, in which reality and artifice merge
to reveal the impossibility of unmediated experience of a place, its genius loci
and identity.
References
Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, London: Verso.
Antoniadis, K. (1995), ‘Η σκοτεινή όψη της φωτογραφίας’, Fotografia (34): 10–12.
Antoniadis, K. (1996), ‘Photography in Greece, 1970–1980’, in Yiorgos Depollas,
Photographs 1975–1995, Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 13–14 (bilingual
edition).
Badger, G. (1987), ‘Troubled Landscapes’, in P. Graham, Troubled Land. The Social
Landscape of Northern Ireland, London: Grey Editions in association with
Cornerhouse Publications, n.p.
Balafas, K. (1995), ‘Μαρτυρίες για τη ζωή και το έργο του Δ. Χαρισιάδη’, in D.A.
Tzimas (ed.), Δ.Α. Χαρισιάδης. Φωτογραφίες 1911–1993, Athens: Fotografos
Editions, 164–7.
Barthes, R. (1977), Image, Music, Text, New York: Hill and Wang.
Bourdieu, P. (1986), Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated
by Richard Nice, London, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Burgin, V. (1982a), ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, in V. Burgin (ed.),
Thinking Photography, Hampshire: Macmillan, 39–83 (essay first published 1975).
Burgin, V. (1982b), ‘Looking at Photographs’, in V. Burgin (ed.), Thinking
Photography, Hampshire: Macmillan, 143–53 (essay first published 1977).
Carter, S.B. (2006), ‘Επίσκεψη στην Ήπειρο, 5–22 Φεβρουαρίου 1946’, in
F. Konstantinou, J. Weber, S. Petsopoulos (eds), Η φωτογράφος Βούλα
Παπαϊωάννου από το Φωτογραφικό Αρχείο του Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Athens:
Agra/ Benaki Museum, 581–97.
Corbus Bezner, L. (2000), Photography and Politics in America from the New Deal
into the Cold War, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Den Doolaard, A. (1958), This is Greece, I. The Mainland with 83 Photographs by
Cas Oorthuys, Oxford/London: Bruno Cassirer, Faber & Faber.
Durand, R. (2003/1993), ‘Event, Trace, Intensity’, in D. Campany (ed.), Art and
Photography, London: Phaidon, 242–4.
Eisner, R. (1991), Travelers to an Antique Land. The History and Literature of Travel
to Greece, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Frantz, A. and L. Talcott (eds) (1941), This is Greece, New York: Hastings House.
Graham, P. (1996), Interview with Gillian Wearing, in P. Graham, Paul Graham,
London: Phaidon, 8–35.
Greek Office of Information (1949), A Pictorial Guide to Greece. Past and Present,
London: Greek Office of Information.
Hunter, I.L. (1947), This is Greece, London: Evans.
Imsiridou, G. (2009), ‘Βιώνοντας τον Δημήτρη Χαρισιάδη’, in Georgia Imsiridou
(ed.), Δημήτρης Χαρισιάδης, Athens: Benaki Museum, 13–21.
Jenkins, W. (ed.) (1975), The New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered
Landscape, exhibition catalogue, New York/Rochester: George Eastman
House, n.p.
Kokkinias, P. (2012), Panos Kokkinias, contributions by S. Kismaric, R. Durand and

A. Moschovi, New York: Powerhouse.
Konstantinou, F. (2006), ‘Γύρω από τη ζωή και το έργο της Βούλας Παπαϊωάννου’,
in F. Konstantinou, J. Weber and S. Petsopoulos (eds), Η φωτογράφος Βούλα
Παπαϊωάννου από το Φωτογραφικό Αρχείο του Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Athens:
Agra/ Benaki Museum, 11–38.
Konstantinou, F. and E. Boudouri (1993), H Ελλάδα της Nelly’s. Φωτογραφίες
1921–1939, Athens: Benaki Museum.

MacCannell, D. (1999/1976), The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class,
Berkeley: University of California.
Meletzopoulos, G. (1957), ‘Η Φωτογραφία ως Τέχνη’, Elliniki Fotografia (9): 17.
Miclewright, N. (2003), A Victorian Traveler in the Middle East. The Photography
and Travel Writing of Annie Lady Brassey, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Moschovi, A. (2003), ‘Η (αν)αποφασιστική στιγμή. Η μετεξέλιξη της φωτογραφίας
ντοκουμέντο στην Ελλάδα τη δεκαετία του 1980’, in J. Stathatos (ed.), 1o
Συνέδριο για την Ιστορία της Ελληνικής Φωτογραφίας, Ελληνικές Φωτογραφικές
Μελέτες, Thessaloniki, Museum of Photography/Kythera Photographic
Encounters, 123–33.
Moschovi, A. (2005), ‘Δημήτρης Χαρισιάδης. Ένας στρατευμένος μοντερνιστής’,
Kathimerini Epta Imeres (30 October), 15–23.
Moschovi, A. (2009a), ‘From the Representation of Politics to the Politics of
Representation’, in A. Moschovi and A. Tsirgialou (eds), Greece through
Photographs: 160 Years of Visual Testimony, Athens: Melissa, 50–73.
Moschovi, A. (2009b), ‘Η απλή και ανόθευτος φωτογραφία’, in Georgia Imsiridou
(ed.), Δημήτρης Χαρισιάδης, Athens: Benaki Museum, 23–34.
Moschovi, A. (2009c), ‘Introduction’, in Realities and Plausibilities. Re-enacting
Realism in Contemporary Photographic Art, exhibition catalogue, Athens: Xippas
Gallery, 5–13.
Moschovi, A. (2010), ‘Re-Imag(in)ing Arcadia. British Intervention in the Post-
War Reconstruction of Greece, c. 1945–46’, in D. Wills (ed.), Greece and Britain
since 1945, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 61–97.
Osborne, P. (2003), ‘Photography in an Expanding Field’, in D. Green (ed.), Where
is the Photograph, Maidstone: Photoworks/Photoforum, 63–70.
Panayotopoulos, N. (1979), ‘Σχόλιο με αφορμή την XV Biennale της FIAP και την
XII Πανελλήνια Έκθεση της Ελληνικής Φωτογραφικής Εταιρίας’, Fotografia
(12–13): 495–6.
Panayotopoulos, N. (2009), ‘On Greek Photography. Eurocentrism, Cultural
Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece’, Third Text
23(2): 181–94.
Papaioannou, I. (2005), ‘Δημήτρης Λέτσιος’, in Δημήτρης Λέτσιος. Οδοιπορία στο
φως και τη σκια της Ελλάδας, exhibition catalogue, Thessaloniki: Museum of
Photography.
Papaioannou, V. (1949), Hellas, texts by Demosthenes Daniilides, Novara: Istituto
Geographico De Agostini.
Papaioannou, V. (1953), La Grèce à ciel ouvert, texts: Pierre Jacquet, Lausanne:

Clairefontaine/La Guilde du Livre.
Papaioannou, V. (1956), Iles Grecques, texts by Mimika Kranaki, Lausanne:
Clairfontaine and Guilde du Livre.
Papakyriakou, C. (1954), ‘Οι σκοποί μας’, Elliniki Fotografia (1): 10.
Reitz, K. (1949), ‘Photographic Competitions and How to Win Them’, Amateur
Photographer (1 June): 380–81.
Rosler, M. (1989), ‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)’,

in R. Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography,
Cambridge/Massachusetts/London: MIT Press, 303–42.
Ryan, J. (1997), Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of British
Empire, London: Reaktion.
Sekula, A. (1979), ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary. (Notes on
the Politics of Representation)’, in T. Dennett and J. Spence (eds), Photography/
Politics: One, London: Photography Workshop, 170–85.
Siegner, O. (1955), This is Greece: A Picture Book, Munich: Ludwig Simon.
Stallabrass, J. (2007), ‘What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in
Contemporary Art Photography’, October (122): 71–90.
Stathatos, J. (1988), A Post-Classical Landscape: Greek Photography in the 1980s,
exhibition organised by the Photographic Centre of Athens, Athens: Hellenic
Centre of Photography.
Photography 1870–1995, exhibition catalogue, Thessaloniki: Camera Obscura.
Stathatos, J. (1997), Image and Icon. The New Greek Photography, 1975–95, exhibition
catalogue, Thessaloniki: Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art.
Stimson, B. (2006), The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT.
Stott, W. (1973), Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Szarkowski, J. (1966), The Photographer’s Eye, New York: MoMA.
Szarkowski, J. (1967), ‘New Documents’, wall label, no. 821, New York: MoMA
Archive.
Tagg, J. (1982), ‘The Currency of the Photograph’, in The Burden of Representation,
Hampshire: Macmillan (essay first published 1978).
Tagg, J. (1997), ‘The World of Photography or Photography of the World?’, in
J. Evans (ed.), The Camerawork Essays: Context and Meaning in Photography,
London: Rivers Oram Press, 64–73 (essay first published 1977).
Theodoropoulos, E. (1959), This is Greece: A Survey of the History and Character of
Ancient and Modern Greece with Illustrations, Athens.
Tsirgialou, A. (2009), ‘Greek Photography 1847–1909. Uniformity and a
Difference of Perspective’, in A. Moschovi and A. Tsirgialou (eds), Greece
through Photographs: 160 Years of Visual Testimony, Athens: Melissa.
Vervenioti, T. (2009), Αναπαραστάσεις της Ιστορίας. Η δεκαετία του 1940 από τα
αρχεία του Διεθνούς Ερυθρού Σταυρού, Athens: Melissa.
Westgeest, H. and H. Van Gelder (2011), Photography Theory in Historical

Perspective, London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Yerassopoulos, Y. (1956), ‘Η φωτογραφία ως ερασιτεχνία και επαγγελματισμός’,
Elliniki Fotografia (7): 15.

3
Photographing Greece in the

Nineteenth Century: An Overview
Aliki Tsirgialou
Writing on nineteenth-century photography of Greece in 1990 the American

diplomat and photography collector Gary Edwards mentioned that
early photographers [documenting the country] followed what might be called a standard
iconographic programme in selecting sights at which they pointed their cameras, an iconographic
tradition that not only predated photography […] but continued for about 25 years following Joly
de Lotbinière’s 1839 views (Edwards 1990: 171).
Indeed, when studying nineteenth-century photographic depictions of Greece, one

will undoubtedly notice a uniformity of subject matter. It is generally agreed that
photographers working in Greece limited their visual choices to archaeological sites
and ancient ruins.1 Over the years, modern historians have, in their turn, concentrated
their extensive study on these images underlining not only their importance as
emblems of lost times but also their significance as records of the critical state to
which the monuments had been reduced by the plundering and vandalism that
had occurred during the years of Ottoman rule. This thematic repetition has led to
the ‘standardised’ conclusion that nineteenth-century topographical photography
in Greece is stylised. This general thesis is further supported by the fact that
the photographic representations of the country that do not conform to this
iconographic pattern have not yet been tackled and remain unknown to this day,
hidden in private collections or uncatalogued in institutional archives.
This chapter will explore this iconographic tradition, classifying the themes
adopted by photographers visiting or living in nineteenth-century Greece and
explaining the reasons that led to this thematic repetition. This does not mean
1
Stathatos 1996: 25–8; Ritter 1999: 9–21; Konstantinou and Tsirgialou 2003: 23–9; Szegedy-
Maszak 2005a: 331–61. For further reading on nineteenth-century photography in Greece see also
Dewitz 1990; Papadopoulos 2005; Moschovi and Tsirgialou 2009.
77
that there is no underlying diversity in approach; each individual photographer, in

his pictures and his personal style, transmitted the product of his own individual
imagination. However, the aim of this chapter is to give an overall view of the
themes in nineteenth-century topographical photography in Greece, in the hope
that this part of photographic history will be further explored and re-evaluated in
the future.
The antiquities
The formal announcement of the invention of photography at the French Academy

of Arts in August 1839 coincided with the golden age of travel. Improvements in
transport – the expansion of railway networks, and advancements in steamship
technology – facilitated the movement of travellers and made available a wide
variety of new and far-flung destinations. Large travel agencies, such as Thomas
Cook, also organised group travel to Mediterranean countries, so that people could
experience the Near East and develop an appreciation for the archaic and classical
eras. Already widespread in aristocratic circles since the eighteenth century,
journeys to the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean combining education and
leisure were known as the Grand Tour,2 and they gained more and more enthusiasts
during the period of the Industrial Revolution.
Due to its particular geographical position, Greece could be visited on the way
to the Near East and, although it was not included in the standard itinerary of
the Grand Tour, it was an important stop for travellers en route to the Holy
Lands. The country, however, stood for ‘a vision, an idea, rather than a specific and
real geographical location’ (Tsigakou 2005: 206), and the enjoyment of a visit to
Athens, Delphi or Corinth lay in an ‘intellectual, rather than a visual’ experience
(Tsigakou 1995: 38).
The first traveller-photographers arrived in the newly-founded Greek state
with their cumbersome cameras after a long, tiring and often dangerous journey.
With travel guides in hand, and following the pre-planned routes suggested by
these, they began a quest, or rather a journey of ‘rediscovery’ (Tsigakou 1981)
of the ancient civilisation.3 Greece, set apart by linguistic and topographical
barriers, necessitated the consultation of such books, the majority of which
proposed visits to the archaeological sites, often commenting on their singular
qualities. Nearly all guidebooks began their itineraries with Athens because
of the attractions it provided in itself and also because of its convenience as a
starting point for tours to the interior of Greece. Travellers were recommended
to begin their visit with the Acropolis, which dominated the landscape, then
2
For further reading on the Grand Tour in relation to photography, see Adam 1985; Sobieszek
1989: 132–4; Zannier 1997.
3
For further reading on this subject see Spencer 1954; Tsigakou 1981; Constantine 1984;
Tsigakou 1991.
Photographing Greece in the nineteenth century 79
continue with the ruins surrounding it. In this sense, they were encouraged to
follow a pre-determined route and in cases document the pre-selected sites
recommended by these publications.
This guided pattern was often duplicated in the structure of most nineteenth-
century photographic albums.4 In fact, in the majority of them, the narrative
begins with panoramic views of the Acropolis and continues with the close
visual inspection of its individual monuments, followed by photographs of the
archaeological sites adjacent to the Acropolis. The last pages are usually devoted
primarily to depictions of the antiquities outside Athens but still within the region
of Attica and secondly to illustrations of the temples scattered in the rest of the
country.
Whether intent on creating enduring memories of their journey or on
meeting the demands of the market, in their quest for the Greek ideal these early
photographers, who were also limited by the capacities of the medium at that time,5
restricted their choice of subjects to the depiction of ancient monuments. These
restrictions, however, (perhaps distortedly) projected a preference for the ancient
Greek world, which monopolised the photographic output of the nineteenth
century, ultimately helping to form a stereotyped prism through which ‘the
ideologically annotated landscape’ (Skarpelos 2005: 228) of Greece was identified
with that of classical times.
The Acropolis was photographed for the first time in October 1839 by the
Canadian Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière who was touring the Mediterranean
on behalf of the French publisher Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours. Unfortunately,
none of the eleven daguerreotypes he made has survived, apart from three
engraved copies (aquatints) printed in the luxury volume entitled Excursions
Daguérrienes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (1840–1844).6 The
4
Examples of this guided pattern can be found in the albums compiled by James Robertson
(held at the Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum) and Constantine Athanasiou (held at the
Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive). Also in compilation albums (C0938, nos 242 and 464)
including images by numerous photographers held at the Firestone Library of Princeton University.
5
The long exposure times required for the photosensitive plates made it impossible to
photograph moving objects; photographers had to turn to ‘fixed’ subjects, such as architecture and, in
the case of Greece, antiquities.
6
In this volume Lotbinière described his impressions while photographing in Athens: ‘I had
already admired the beauties of the Acropolis in detail when I first went there with my daguerreotype
camera. At that time I was a strict observer of Daguerre’s rules, and I intended not to waste a moment
in exposing my plate to the rays of the sun. Nonetheless I was greatly confused by the need to choose
among so many masterpieces, I turned my camera first one way and then another. In the end, the
position of the sun led me to decide on the view of the Propylaea, that marvellous gateway which is
such a worthy introduction to the wonders of the Acropolis. I cannot deny that I regretted having
to turn my back on the divine Parthenon and the Erechtheion, but my regret soon faded before the
magical view laid out before me’. (Excursions Daguérrienes: Vues et Monuments les plus Remarquables du
Globe, Paris: Rittner et Goupil, Lerebours, Hr Bossange, 1842). For further reading on Lotbinière’s
travels see Desautels 2010.
aquatints depict the Parthenon, with the Turkish mosque visible in the cella,7 the
Propylaea, and the Temple of Olympian Zeus, with the three isolated columns
still standing.8 Having no previous photographic work to rely on, Lotbinière
initiated the iconographic programme as described by Gary Edwards at the
beginning of this chapter.
The earliest surviving photographic images of Greece were taken by the French
artist and historian of Islamic architecture Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey
who was on an extended tour from France through Italy, Greece and Egypt to
Asia Minor, Turkey, Syria and Palestine that lasted from 1842 until early 1845
(Stewart 2005: 66–93). He returned to France with 800 to 1,000 daguerreotypes,
a selection of which he published as lithographs in a volume entitled Monuments
Arabes d’ Egypte, de Syrie, et d’ Asie Mineure dessinés et mesurés de 1842 à 1845 (Paris
1846). Prangey arrived in Athens in 1842, where he remained for five or six weeks
photographing the city’s attractions.
Daguerreotypes held in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles also
illustrate Greek antiquities. These are attributed to the first Greek professional
photographer Philippos Margaritis (Xanthakis 1990), who was initiated to the
secrets of the new invention by the Frenchman Philibert Perraud in late 1846.9
The archaeological sites of Athens were further documented by the French
diplomat Baron Jean Baptiste-Louis Gros. In May 1850, the latter was sent to
Greece to ‘settle the Anglo-Greek disagreements, in particular those relating to
the transfer of the marble [sic] of the Parthenon’ (Bajac 2008). It was during
that time that Gros created approximately 80 technically proficient daguerreotypes
depicting the monuments and the surrounding area.
In the years that followed, many photographers arrived in the country with
the intention to document the archaeological sites. Amongst the pioneers of the
calotype era are the Englishman Claudius Wheelhouse (2006),10 the Frenchman
Eugène Piot, the German August Oppenheim and the Irishman John Shaw
Smith. The photographs of this period reflect a preference for slightly blurry and
grainy images, which had been associated with a ‘pictorial’ quality.
7
The mosque must have been built after 1699. It appears for the first time in 1755 in the
drawings of J.D. le Roy. It was demolished in 1842.
8
Today there are only two columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus still standing. The third
collapsed during a fierce storm in 1852.
9
Early travelling photographers with their ‘mysterious’ apparatus provoked the curiosity and
admiration of locals, who often approached them for further information on photographic processes. It
appears that Perraud visited Athens some time between the end of 1846 to the early 1847 and taught
Margaritis the basics of daguerreotypy. The collaboration of the two men is well documented, see Adam
and Xanthakis 1992.
10
Calotype or talbotype is the first photographic method to be based on the negative-positive
process. It was introduced by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841. The negative image was projected
onto paper sensitised with silver iodide from which several positives could be made by contact printing.
For a selection of Wheelhouse’s images, see Wheelhouse 2006.
In the mid-1850s, a period of further development in photographic technology,

the calotype was replaced by the wet collodion process, which not only substantially
reduced exposure times but also provided a sharper image that enhanced the quality
of architectural details.11 Additionally, travellers became increasingly intrigued by the
‘new discovery’, and the profession of photographer began to appear more attractive
in commercial terms. Thus, a line of photographers began, whose photographic
views of Greek antiquities would invade Europe in the form of souvenirs brought
home by tourists. Prominent among them are the Englishmen Francis Frith and
Francis Bedford,12 the Frenchman Félix Bonfils (Szegedy-Maszak 2001: 13–43)
and German Jakob August Lorent (Wallner 1994).
By the end of the 1860s the photographic market for monuments and genre
scenes had proliferated beyond all expectations. As a consequence, the first large
commercial photography studios appeared in order to satisfy the demand for
souvenir images. To facilitate transactions, the well-known Greek photographer
Petros Moraites (Xanthakis 2001) issued a catalogue of what he names his ‘Grande
collection photographique’ listing the 76 images available to possible buyers.13 It
is no surprise that with the exception of five photographs, the rest in his catalogue
depict ancient sites.
Since most photographers produced work merely to satisfy customers’
requirements, they avoided artistic experimentation which would produce
a better aesthetic result. Furthermore, the uniformity of the subjects easily
reveals a standardised treatment. The Acropolis was inevitably included in
most nineteenth-century photographs of Athens. In fact, most photographers
documented the Acropolis from selective view-points placing it within an urban
context. The monument was usually depicted from Lycabettus Hill, showing a
large part of the city from the area around the Ilissos River with the Temple of
the Olympian Zeus in the foreground and from the northwest including the
temple of Hephaestus (Theseion) in the frame. In cases where photographers
were particularly impressed by the magnificence of the monument, they portrayed
it from different angles. Fine examples of such documentation are the calotypes
taken by the French architect Alfred-Nicolas Normand (Fig. 3.1) during his visit
to Athens in autumn 1851 (Normand 1978).
The Parthenon, the monument that received most photographic attention,
was usually taken from the east and from the west, the Propylaea were usually
11
The wet collodion process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. It consisted in
coating the glass plate with collodion, a solution of pyroxilin in ether and alcohol, and then sensitising
it by immersing it in a solution of silver nitrate. The plates were placed in the camera while still wet. This
meant that travelling photographers had to carry with them chemicals and darkroom equipment.
12
The album entitled The Holy Land, Egypt, Constantinople, Athens, etc. A series of forty-eight
photographs taken by Francis Bedford for H.R.H. the Prince of Wales during the Tour in the East, in which by
command, he accompanied His Royal Highness is held in the collection of the Gennadius Library in Athens.
13
A copy of this catalogue is held in the collection of the Photographic Archive of the Hellenic
Literary and Historical Archive, Athens.
Figure 3.1 Alfred-Nicolas Normand, The Arch of Adrian with the Acropolis
in the background, 1851, albumen print from calotype negative
documented from the east with the Frankish tower showing, the Temple of
Athena Nike was captured in such a way that the reliefs temporarily kept in
the interior were visible, and, finally, the Erechtheion was illustrated mostly
from the south presenting the porch of the Caryatids. Below the Acropolis,
the monuments surrounding it were also illustrated in a standardised way. For
example: the façade of the Herodes Atticus theatre was photographed including
a part of the Parthenon, the Hill of the Areopagus with a small part of the
modern city showing to the right, and the temple of Olympian Zeus with the
Acropolis visible in the background. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak has observed
that many photographic studies of the west face of the Parthenon resemble one
another so closely that, in the absence of a signature or some other identifying
mark, it is all but impossible to specify the maker (Szegedy-Maszak 2005a: 342).
Yet beyond this thematic unity, one may discern an underlying diversity in
approach. A closer analysis of the photographs supports the thesis that in the case
of Greek antiquities the same subject was observed, examined and documented
by each photographer from a different perspective. A comparative study of the
photographs taken by the British James Roberston and the American William
James Stillman may reveal several differences in composition. For example, in
Robertson’s images, the monuments are portrayed with the presence of human
figures included for diversity and scale and at the same time evoking engravings
of the same views (Konstantinou 1998: 49). On the other hand, in Stillman’s
innovative photographs, the accuracy of the architectural structures is in perfect
harmony with the picturesque natural surroundings (Ehrenkranz 1988; Szegedy-
Maszak 2005b: 1–34).
The majority of the archaeological photographs taken in the nineteenth
century excludes human presence. This was not due to the technical aspects
of photography and the limitations imposed by the long exposure times, but,
according to Szegedy-Maszak, was rather a conscious choice on the part of the
photographers ‘to remove from their pictures any unseemly intrusion from the
present day that might disrupt the viewer’s contemplation of the ancient world’
(Szegedy-Maszak 2005c: 14). Human beings, as decorative features in framed
photographs, wearing either European dress or local costume, detracted from the
image of ancient Greece. Moreover, interest in antiquities and the way in which
they were depicted was nourished mainly by the market, which sought information
about Greece and its history through ‘real’ pictures. In fact, the travellers’s desire
to preserve an indelible memory of the lands they visited corresponded perfectly
with the ability of accurate recording offered by photography.
An overall examination of the photographic depiction of Greece during
the nineteenth century reveals that classical monuments were not the only
architectural subjects favoured by the photographic lens. Selective Byzantine
monuments also aroused the interest of nineteenth-century photographers in
Greece. Within the earliest photographic depictions of Athens that exist today,
one will find photographs of the city’s main churches. Agios Eleftherios, the
cathedral of Athens at the time and the church of Kapnikarea on Ermou Street
seem to be documented for the first time in 1842 by Girault de Prangey. The
church of Soteira Lykodemou which now serves as the capital’s Russian church
was captured in the early 1860s by Philippos Margaritis. The monastery of
Daphne, located on the Sacred Way outside Athens, provided an essential site to
visit. On the occasion of its depiction, the photographers Dimitrios Constantinou
and Petros Moraites also captured rather interesting views of the surrounding
landscape. With their back turned towards the Byzantine monument, they
documented the remains of what was once the ancient road which linked Athens
and Eleusis, with the island of Salamis in the background.
Unlike travellers like Byron and painters like Lear, the diversity of the
Greek landscape did not attract those early photographers, who concentrated
on the discovery or rediscovery of the remains of ancient Greek civilisation.
Researching nineteenth-century topographical photographs of Greece, one
encounters depictions of rocky and barren ground or of fields covered with dry
weeds. If the identification provided by the caption were omitted, these images
could be considered as early landscape photography of Greece. However, linked
to their location, they once again fall within the iconographic tradition discussed
so far. Although they do not illustrate monuments, they reflect visual fragments
of ancient Greek history. Examples of such cases can be found in the work of
Dimitrios Constantinou and Constantin Athanasiou. The first photographed the

view of the channel between the island of Salamis and the coast of Attica in
which the naval battle had been fought in 480 BC and the latter the plain of
Marathon where the battle between the Athenians and the Persians took place
(in 490 BC).
The city
During the first decades of the Greek kingdom, Athens was a small city,
extending mostly in front of the palace and between the Acropolis and the
Lycabettus Hill.14 Traces of the long period of Ottoman rule were still
evident. The overall impression was that of a large construction site. Eastern
characteristics appeared in the presence of Turkish mosques and Western
influence in the modern architecture. A traveller during the 1850s remarked:
‘There is nothing particularly Greek in the physiognomy of Athens. The houses
of the better sort are German in outward appearance, while the poorer dwellings
resemble those of the Italian villages’.15
Upon their arrival, many travellers expressed their feeling of disappointment
at the view of what was described as the ‘dirtiest little town in all Christendom’
(Usborne 1840: 49). Amongst the first to document the city in the new medium
was the English Reverend George Wilson Bridges. Standing on the Acropolis
in 1848, he photographed the densely built part of the town on its northern
slope. The panorama of Athens from this point became probably one of the
favourite views. These shots today testify to the rapid growth of the city in
the mid-nineteenth century. Lycabettus Hill and the newly-constructed royal
Palace were nearly always included in the frame. As years went by and the
city developed in other directions, the selection of viewpoints shifted and a
variety of different panoramic views of the city were added. Such views included
Athens photographed from the Acropolis looking towards Mount Hymettus
and featuring the Temple of Olympian Zeus in the foreground, or a view of the
city overlooking Mount Parnes with the industrial zone visible.
Pascal Sébah and Dimitrios Constantinou saw the city in a less conventional
way. Their first photographs, from the mid-1870s, show the part of Athens as
it develops on the southwest side of Lycabettus Hill showing the Neapolis
quarter and the area around Omonoia Square. Later ones depict the bare
Attic ground, seen from the Observatory with the mountain of Aigaleo as a
backdrop. It is possible that these atypical images were intended to form part
of a multi-piece panorama of the city. Nevertheless, viewed separately, as they
have been found, they arouse the researcher’s curiosity. Unusual points of view
14
On the urban planning of nineteenth-century Athens see Travlos 1993; Bastea 2000; Biris 2005.
15
Cited in Tsigakou 1981: 68.
Figure 3.2 Rhomaides Brothers, Syntagma Square, Athens, c. 1900, collotype

were also selected by the German photographer Henri Beck in 1864.16 Settled
in Athens, Beck seems to have been interested more in the city’s rapid growth
and in the newly constructed public buildings. As long exposure times did not
permit moving subjects to be captured on film, his photographs depict the
Greek capital deserted, to the extent that Athens appears to be an uninhabited
city.
The first professional photographers to systematically record the modern
city were the Romaides Brothers (Fig. 3.2). During the last decade of the
nineteenth century, they portrayed the architectural physiognomy of Athens
focusing on the most important public and private buildings in neoclassical
style such as the University and the Academy. In their images, the human
presence is discreet, while the buildings are displayed in all their splendour and
gravitas. Their views of the main squares and streets provide today an image of
the city’s urban structure at the time. Printed with the collotype method – a
cheap method of mass-producing prints – these photographs circulated widely
on the market.
16
The album entitled Vues d’Athènes et de ses monuments (1868), which contains 52 photographs
taken by Henri Beck, is held in the collection of the Gennadius Library, Athens.
Figure 3.3 Zachariades Brothers, Korai Street, Athens, c. 1895, collodion

aristotype
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, remarkable views of the city can
be found in the work of several amateur photographers. Photography, hitherto
the prerogative of the few who had the means to acquire cameras, was now
becoming accessible to broader social strata. This process was assisted by the
invention of the first easy-to-use portable camera by Kodak in 1888, and the
availability of flexible film. Unlike the professionals, who adapted their choice
of subject to suit market demand, amateur photographers were not constrained
by the need to make a living and were uninfluenced by guidelines on subject
matter. They used the camera to record, and consequently to preserve, personal
moments at the time they happened. Most of them, who were anonymous,
loved the medium and devoted themselves fully to it. They invested time in
their photographic experiments, made numerous trial exposures and became
involved with the technical processes of developing and printing. The two
handmade albums created by Zacharias Zachariades (Fig. 3.3), kept now in
the collection of the Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum include
views of the city centre teeming with life.
Figure 3.4 Andreas Vlachakis, Syros, c. 1880, albumen print, from stereoscopic
photograph
Rural and regional Greece
The bulk of the photographs produced in the nineteenth century was the work
of professional photographers who lived in the Greek capital. Nevertheless, a
significant number were taken by photographers in the provinces. Already in
1870, there were four photographic studios in Syros (Eleftheriou 1993: 37). On
this island, which experienced considerable commercial, and therefore economic,
prosperity in the mid-nineteenth century, photographers were very active
from an early date. Amongst the best-known photographers of Syros we may
single out Spyros Venios, Andreas Z. Vlachakis (Fig. 3.4), Georgios Damianos
(Xanthakis 2005b: 72–4) and Frangiskos Desipris. Most of these, however,
were not concerned with drawing up a comprehensive photographic record of
the island landscape but made portraits of local society, in response to market
demand.
Similar photographic activities may also be observed in the Greek regions

under Ottoman rule, such as Thessaloniki, Mytilini and Samos. On the island of
Chios, the first photographers made their appearance as early as 1865 (Tsangaris
and Xanthakis 1996: 12–13). Among them the work of Stavros Pantelidis and
Anastasios Sklavounos stands out. Their views of the island’s capital are unique
historical documents, in that they show the urban design of the town before the
devastating earthquake of 1881.
However, it seems that a more systematic documentation of the Greek provinces

was carried out by foreign photographers visiting or living in the country. In Crete,
the consuls of the Great Powers practised photography in their free time, offering a
pictorial treasure that is unique in both quantity and quality. The Cretan landscape was
portrayed, free of any reference to antiquities, by the Austrian vice-consul Giuseppe
Berinda and the French consul Paul Blanc (Simandiraki 2010).17 In addition to the
general depiction of Crete, one must add the powerful, almost abstract topographical
images of the American consul William James Stillman (Ehrenkranz 1988: 21,
118–19). In the Ionian Sea, the island of Corfu was extensively photographed by the
Italian professional photographer Bartolomeo Borri (Fig. 3.5; Xanthakis 2006: 64–
6). Besides photographing the island’s bourgeoisie, Borri created albums for sale as
memorabilia, with photographic depictions of the city, port and countryside. These
images were produced in the 1880s and are distinguished both by their excellent
technical processing and the harmonious combination of subjects.
In the images of Borri, and indeed of Berinda, the rural landscape is represented
devoid of the human presence or of features which identify a specific location, this
information being provided by the captions. Free, therefore, from any geographical
reference, but also apparently timeless, these photographs could be considered the
first Greek seascapes (Tsirgialou 2013). However, the representation of the Greek
sea would preoccupy photographers – largely amateurs – to a greater extent in the
early years of the twentieth century.
A limited number of images documenting the Greek mainland are included
in albums produced by photographers touring the country. Leafing through
the portfolio assembled by Baron Paul des Granges in 1869, one will find, next
to his photographs of the most important archaeological sites, a remarkable
selection of Greek landscapes (Harling 1990: 31–7; Xanthakis 2002: 78–81).
However, a more extensive record of the Greek countryside and scenes of daily
life is offered through the wide range of stereographs18 signed by Underwood
and Underwood News Photos Inc (cf. Ionnidis and Mouzakitou in this volume).
Founded in 1880 in Ottawa, Kansas, by Elmer and Bert Underwood this agency
17
Copies of the album entitled Album della Creta with photographs taken by Giuseppe Berinda
in Crete in 1870 are kept in the collections of the Photographic Archive of the Hellenic Literary and
Historical Archive and of the National Historical Museum in Athens, Greece.
18
Stereoscopic images consisted of two photographs placed next to one another, which had
been taken from slightly different angles, usually by a camera with two lenses. When viewed through a
stereoscope, the pictures give the impression of a single three-dimensional image.
Figure 3.5 Bartolomeo Borri, Corfu, c. 1885, albumen print

is considered to be one of the largest nineteenth-century photographic agencies

specialising in the production and sale of stereoscopic pictures. The company’s
personnel included a number of photographers, most unknown to this day, who
travelled the world documenting scenes of everyday life in places as far afield as
Japan. The stereoscopic photographs that were taken in Greece date from 1897
to 1907 and explore a wide area of the country, covering places such as Athens,
Corinth, Patras, Corfu, the Meteora, Delphi, Thebes and Sounion.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth-century, many Greek
photographers turned their attention towards the developing industry and
modernisation projects. Anastasios Gaziades, for example, a leading photographer
based in Piraeus, recorded since 1885 the works for the opening of the Corinth
Canal (Xanthakis 2005a: 63). Around the same time, Theologos F. Fyntanidis
made a visual survey of the exploitation of the iron ore mines of Serifos.19 The work
of Dimitris Michailides may also be assigned to a similar context. The photographs
depicting the newly constructed railway stations and the extensions to the network
19
An album with photographs taken by Fyntanidis in Serifos is held in the photographic
collection of the National Historical Museum, Athens.
included in his album Souvenirs de Thessalie are possibly the first record of the
Greek railway development programme in the region.20
In general, among nineteenth-century depictions of the Greek countryside, we do
not encounter images of rural life or rural scenery. Pioneer photographers in Greece
did not depict country life scenes or details of forest life, a fact that emphasises
further their preference for the ancient Greek world. Only a very few escaped this
pictorial tradition and turned their lens to the country’s natural features. Visitors,
seeking images and symbols of the ancient past were indifferent to rocky, infertile
and inaccessible landscapes. This is hardly surprising if one takes into account that,
among other things, most traveller-photographers of the time came from western
and northern European countries, where the highly picturesque quality of the
natural landscape had provided the main source of artistic inspiration for centuries.
The visual criterion of nineteenth-century professional photographers was
determined first and foremost by market demand. In their efforts to respond to
their customers’ requirements, they avoided artistic experimentations designed to
achieve a better aesthetic result. Therefore, photography of Greece, as practised
during the first 50 years by Greek photographers, cannot lay claim to any great
artistic pretensions. For this entire period it seemed inflexible in terms of creativity,
despite the medium’s technological progress. Contemporary currents that were
predominant abroad had no impact on Greek photography. In addition, earlier
trends were adopted after a certain time lag. This may be observed mainly in the
work of the photographers, such as Dimitrios Constantinou, who were able to
travel abroad and keep abreast with international developments in photography.
If there was a degree of individual expression that exceeded purely historical
documentation, it manifested mainly in the work of foreign photographers such as
James Robertson and William James Stillman.
Given the particular capacity of the photograph to make faithful records, early
photographic examples have by now mainly been perceived as historical documents,
valued for the information they provided. In other words, it is not the quantity
of photographs depicting the monuments that form the iconographic programme
described by Gary Edwards at the beginning of this chapter, but also the fact that
until now photographs have been primarily assessed as unique visual testimonies of
classical architecture. As I have shown in this chapter, late research has uncovered
a significant number of photographic images that divert from classical themes;
this urges for a re-examination of nineteenth-century photography in Greece. In
this case, the subject matter should not be reviewed through the prism of modern
visual values but from the point of view of the technical difficulties encountered by
the first aspiring photographers.
20
Some of the photographs taken during his journey are included in a leather-bound album
entitled Souvenirs de Thessalie, held in the collection of the Photographic Archive of the Hellenic
Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA/MIET), Athens.
References
Adam, H.C. (1985), Reiseerinnerungen von damals. Bilder von der Grand Tour des
19. Jahrhunderts, Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation.
Adam, H.C. and A.X. Xanthakis (1992), ‘Margaritis and the Mysterious Perraud:
Early Daguerreotypes of Classical Athens’, History of Photography 16(1): 61–9.
Bajac, Q. (2008), ‘Gros, Baron Jean Baptiste-Louis (1793–1870)’ in J. Hannavy
(ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, New York: Routledge,

623–4.
Bastea, E. (2000), The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Beck, H. (1868), Vues d’Athènes et de ses monuments, Berlin: Asher.
Bedford, F. (1866), The Holy Land, Egypt, Constantinople, Athens, etc. A series of
forty-eight photographs taken by Francis Bedford for H.R.H. the Prince of Wales
during the Tour in the East, in which by command, he accompanied His Royal
Highness, London: Day.
Biris, K. (1995), Αι Αθήναι από τον 19ον εις τον 20ον αιώνα, Athens: Melissa.
Constantine, D. (1984), Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, Cambridge:
Desautels, J. (ed.) (2010), Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière. Voyage en Orient
(1839–1840), Journal d’ un voyageur curieux du monde et d’ un pionnier de la
daguerréotypie, Canada: Les Presses de l’ Université Laval.
Dewitz, B. von (ed.) (1990), Das Land der Griechen mit der Seele Suchen, Cologne:
Agfa Foto-Historama.
Edwards, G. (1990), ‘Photographs of Greece in the Musée d’Orsay’s Album of the
Duc de Chartres’, History of Photography 14(2): 165–79.
Ehrenkranz, A. (1988), William James Stillman: Poetic Localities: Photographs of the
Adirondacks, Cambridge, Crete, Italy, Athens, New York: Aperture.
Eleftheriou, M. (1993), Ενθύμιον Σύρου, Athens: Gnosi.
Excursions Daguérrienes: Vues et Monuments les plus remarquables du globe, Paris:
Rittner et Goupil, Lerebours, Hr Bossange, 1842.
Harling, R. (1990), ‘Paul Baron des Granges, Materialien zur Biographie eines
vergessenen Photographen’, Das Land der Griechen mit den Seele Suchen, Köln:
Agfa Foto-Historama.
Konstantinou, F. (1998), ‘James Robertson: A Photographer-Traveller in Athens’,
in Photographs by James Robertson, ‘Athens and Grecian Antiquities’, 1853–54,
From the Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum, Athens: Benaki Museum,
43–53.
Konstantinou, F. and A. Tsirgialou (eds) (2003), Athens 1839–1900: A Photographic
Record, Athens: Benaki Museum.
Moschovi, A. and A. Tsirgialou (eds) (2009), Greece through Photographs: 160 Years
of Visual Testimony, Athens: Melissa.
Normand, A.N. (1978), Photographies d’Italie, de Grèce et de Constantinople,
Calotypes 1851–52, Bergamo: Grafica Gutenberg.
Papadopoulos, J.K. (2005), ‘Antiquity Depicted’, in C. Lyons et al. (eds), Antiquity

and Photography: Early Views of the Mediterranean Sites, London: Thames and
Hudson, 104–47.
Ritter, D. (1999), Im Lichte des Helios, Griechenland in Frühen Photographien aus der
Sammlung Siegert, Munich: Umschau Braus Verlag.
Simandiraki, Z. (2010), Crete – Images of an Era: The Photo Collection of Paul Blanc,
Consul General of France in Crete (1886–1901), Chania: Municipality of Chania,
Historical Archives of Crete.

Skarpelos, Y. (2005), ‘Η Ελλάδα του τοπίου και το βλέμμα των περιηγητών’,
in P. Doukellis (ed.), Το ελληνικό τοπίο: μελέτες ιστορικής γεωγραφίας και
πρόσληψης του τόπου, Athens: Estia, 225–36.
Sobieszek, R.A. (1989), ‘Travel’, in M. Weaver (ed.), The Art of Photography, 1839–
1989, London: The Royal Academy of Arts, 135–54.
Spencer, T. (1954), Fair Greece Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to
Byron, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Photography 1870–1995, Thessaloniki: Camera Obscura.
Stewart, L.S. (2005), ‘In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotypes of Joseph-
Philibert Girault de Prangey’ in C. Lyons et al. (eds), Antiquity and Photography:
Early Views of the Mediterranean Sites, London: Thames and Hudson, 66–91.
Szegedy-Maszak, A. (2001), ‘Félix Bonfils and the Traveller’s Trail through
Athens’, History of Photography, 25(1): 13–43.
Szegedy-Maszak, A. (2005a), ‘Well-recorded Worth, Photographs of the
Parthenon’, in J. Neils (ed.), The Parthenon from Antiquity to the Present, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 331–60.
Szegedy-Maszak, A. (2005b), ‘An American on the Acropolis: William James
Stillman’, History of Photography, 29(1): 1–34.
Szegedy-Maszak, A. (2005c), ‘Greece’, in C. Lyons et al. (eds), Antiquity and
Photography: Early Views of the Mediterranean Sites, London: Thames and
Hudson, 148–95.
Travlos, I. (1993), Πολεοδομική εξέλιξις των Αθηνών: από των προϊστορικών
χρόνων μέχρι των αρχών του 19ου αιώνος, Athens: Kapon (first published
1960).
Tsangaris, M. and A.X. Xanthakis (1996), Χίος. Εκατό χρόνια φωτογραφίας, 1850–
1950, Athens: Synolo.
Tsigakou, F.M. (1981), The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers and Painters of the
Romantic Era, London: Thames and Hudson.
Tsigakou, F.M. (1991), Through Romantic Eyes: European Images of Nineteenth
Century Greece from the Benaki Museum, Virginia: Art Services International.
Tsigakou, F.M. (1995), Βρετανικές εικόνες της Ελλάδας από τις Συλλογές του
Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Athens: Benaki Museum.
Tsigakou, F.M. (2005), ‘Το ελληνικό τοπίο του 19ου αιώνα’, in P. Doukellis (ed.),
Το ελληνικό τοπίο: μελέτες ιστορικής γεωγραφίας και πρόσληψης του τόπου,
Athens: Estia, 205–24.
Tsirgialou, A. (2013), ‘The Sea in 19th Century Photography: An Accidental

Presence’, in A. Tsirgialou (ed.), Greek Seas: A Photographic Journey in Time,
Athens: Benaki Museum and Melissa, 18–25.
Usborne, T.H. (1840), A New Guide to the Levant; for the Use of Travellers in Greece,
Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, London: Cradock.
Wallner, F.V. (1994), Bilder aus Athen, Photographien 1860 bis 1862 von Jakob August
Lorent, Mannheim.
Wheelhouse, C.G. (2006), Photographic Sketches from the Shores of the Mediterranean,
London: Folios.
Xanthakis, A.X. (1990), Φίλιππος Μαργαρίτης, ο πρώτος έλληνας φωτογράφος,
Athens: Fotografos.
Xanthakis, A.X. (2001), Η Ελλάδα του 19ου αιώνα με το φακό του Πέτρου Μωραΐτη,
Athens: Potamos.
Xanthakis, A.X. (2002), ‘Baron Paul von des Granges, ένας «Έλληνας» Βαρώνος
στην Ελλάδα του 1865’, Fotografos 102: 78–81.
Xanthakis, A.X. (2005a), ‘Αναστάσιος Γαζιάδης, ένας «αμερικανώτατος» Έλλην
καλλιτέχνης’, Fotografos 135: 63.
Xanthakis, A.X. (2005b), ‘Γεώργιος Δαμιανός, φωτογράφος εν Ερμουπόλει’,
Fotografos 137: 72–4.
Xanthakis, A.X. (2006), ‘B. Borri e figlio, μια οικογένεια ιταλών φωτογράφων στην
Κέρκυρα’, Fotografos 145: 64–6.
Zannier, I. (1997), Le Grand Tour in the Photographs of Travelers of the 19th Century,
Venice: Canal Editions.

4
Doors into the Past:

W.J. Stillman (and Freud) on the Acropolis
Frederick N. Bohrer
This chapter is a three-part essay about three distinct but overlapping activities:
looking, seeing and experiencing. Photography plays a significant role in all three
as they have evolved in modernity, a prosthetic for these fundamental human
capacities. But the photograph is not just party to these individual physiological/
psychological functions; it can also serve to construe or codify visual experience
in a way that fixes it for circulation and communication between individuals.
The photograph thus opens onto a larger audience for a single vision, mediating
between an individual/private and multiple/public context.
It was the unique claim of the photographic apparatus rapidly and faithfully
to transform vision into object that first recommended it to nineteenth-century
viewers. Among them were travellers, antiquarians and others concerned with
capturing, studying and amassing the extant material remains of ancient Greece.
The photograph in this context is valued for its ability to disclose a visual, perceptual
fact seemingly as inarguable as the information of the subject matter it records, be
it textual, structural or material. Yet at the same time, it seems obvious that in this
project desire underwrites capacity, that is, that the photograph’s veridical claim
depends at least as much on the drive of the viewing subject as on any internal,
mechanical rendering capability of its own.
This has broad implications for understanding photography as a whole, as well as
particular import for the photographic subject of ancient Greece. James Elkins, for
instance, writes that ‘photography has become an activity that is both the projection
of our desires about the world and an accurate record of the world.’ As he notes, these
two not-wholly-congruent beliefs coexist ‘weirdly but characteristically’ (Elkins 2011:
47; cf. Flusser 2000; Maynard 1997). Elkins’s term ‘projection’ is particularly notable,
as it addresses photography as a means of representation as such, going beyond
medium-specificity to a host of image-processes including inner, psychological
ones as well as those fixed in chemicals. Photography is here the master trope of a
95
larger ‘social ontology’ of images (Osborne 2010) that accounts for the image itself
throughout all the modes of its circulation.
This process of photographic projection is particularly relevant in the case of
photographing and circulating ancient Greek remains for several reasons. Régis
Debray provocatively deems ancient Greek art ‘a collective hallucination’ of recent
Western culture, projecting onto an ancient people a foreign conception of a pure,
aesthetically-minded production of the sort now enshrined in the desacralised
space of the modern art museum (Debray 1992: 231–60). This conceptual
projection has notable cultural and even political correlates. First, the amassing
of photographs of archaeological artifacts served as an aid or provocation to a
desired aesthetic experience. Moreover, it served as part of a Western project of
archaeological acquisition, even allowing ‘virtual’ possession when nation-states
attempted through legislation to make direct acquisition impossible (Hamilakis
2001; Basch 2011).
For both of these projects, the aesthetic and the imperialist, the photograph’s
experiential and evidentiary function is paramount, seemingly validating the
assumption or prejudice of the Western viewer. Yet far from supporting a claim
to unconditional or objective accuracy, looking more closely at the full process
of photographic production and circulation works to underline the virtual
impossibility of there being a seamless transition between the experience of
photographing and the resulting photograph, while highlighting the mediation
of the orientations and desires of the photographing, and viewing, subject.
Looking
From the very moment of its invention in France and England, photography
spread throughout the world, in a pattern that illuminates the interests
and possibilities available to its first practitioners. In November 1839, just
months after the public announcement of Daguerre’s process, Pierre-Gustave
Joly de Lotbinière was one of a group of Frenchmen in the Middle East
and Mediterranean said to be ‘daguerreotyping away like lions,’ revelling in
the new technology and with it greedily capturing all they found attractive
in the phenomenal world (Gernsheim 1982: 83). Greece was on the menu.
On this trip, Joly de Lotbinière made what is probably the first photograph
on the Acropolis. Just as with the earlier erection of a camera obscura on
the same site, the monuments of the Acropolis proved irresistible to early
Western fixers of images (Xanthakis 1988: 22–3). Joly de Lotbinière’s
photograph was published through engraving the following year in the folio
Excursions Daguerriennes (Fig. 4.1) (cf. Hamilakis and Ifantidis, Tsirgialou, this
volume).
This view of the Parthenon is a complex composition, detailing the ancient
structure and describing (with some later embellishment by the engraver) the
surrounding loose stones, while focusing at least as much on two other structures.
Doors into the past 97
Figure 4.1 Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, ‘Parthenon at Athens,’ from

Excursions Daguerriennes, lithograph after daguerreotype, 1842
Source: Department of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
First, there is a utility shed in the foreground, one of several throughout the site
at the time. Second is the remnant of an Ottoman mosque, which had stood
for decades in the site of the ancient sanctuary. Joly de Lotbinière’s image is
both conventionally picturesque and formally complex, a map of the varied,
disordered stimulations of his visit. It juxtaposes, indeed makes a single whole
of, the products of a variety of intermingled cultures, marks of temporalities
both ancient and modern, pagan, Christian and Islamic.
Just about three years later, the photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de
Prangey photographed the Parthenon as well, yet he went around to the very
opposite corner to produce a daguerreotype image of the same place which is
very much unlike, even opposed to, that of Joly de Lotbinière (Fig. 4.2). Girault
de Prangey has kept out of view almost anything but ancient remains, in effect
Figure 4.2 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Façade and north colonnade

of the Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens, daguerreotype, 1842
Source: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
erasing the multiple temporalities of the locale.1 The history of the site itself
notably cooperates with Girault de Prangey’s formative act of envisioning, as in
the years intervening between the two photographs the mosque structure was
taken down, though its trace in a bit of scaffolding clings incongruously to the
left edge of the image. Prangey’s vision wrests from the site a distinctiveness and
clarity that is not cluttered up by complex architectural and historical residue. It
inaugurates a Western conception of the buildings on the Acropolis, based on
a vision that does not merely record what it sees but makes clear both what it
desires to see and also to ignore or even banish from its sight. As we shall see
later, it is a vision with consequences not only for representations but also for
actual material sites.
Girault de Prangey’s choice of viewpoint looks away from the inconvenient
touches of contemporary Greece elsewhere in the monuments to focus solely on
the dramatic remnant of its past. Just as the subject of the photograph is refined,
1
On this archaeological-cum-photographic erasure, see Bohrer 2011: 97–100, and Hamilakis and
Ifantidis, this volume.
or perhaps, purified, so too is the composition of the image. Rather than Joly de
Lotbinière’s jagged outlines and asymmetrical placement, Girault de Prangey,
a trained painter, presents an elegant, geometrically coherent composition
which plays with and precisely bisects the frame. The Parthenon thus rises in
visual prominence to attain something like the photographic presence it still is
accorded today at just the moment it is literally isolated on its site, to become a
Western icon for a French audience. Note, too, that on the steps at left a camera
is included in the photograph, a mark of scale, but also a sort of signature to this
self-consciously aestheticised image, a trace of the structure’s appropriation by
the French-invented daguerreotype apparatus.
Thus despite photography’s claim to objective truth (which was largely
uncontested in the nineteenth century), Joly de Lotbinière and Girault de
Prangey offer two very different invocations of a common site, both of which
stood for the same locale. Far from adding to a positivist taxonomy of world
monuments, as the text of the quasi-encyclopaedic Excursions Daguerriennes
strongly suggested, they are testimony to photography’s action to fracture, not
codify, phenomenal reality. More exactly, they are a clue that the fixing of an
image is not so much a purely technical or chemical matter so much as an
ideological or even political one. Also, as Prangey’s image suggests, the visual
rhetoric derived from painterly composition – of space, symmetry, lighting etc.
– plays a role here that is hardly neutral, but serves to amplify a particular
position, one dedicated to the object as pristine ruin of a desired past. The
image is less purely a record of ‘what is there’ and more what the viewer, the
photographer or some larger audience, wants to see.
How is the Acropolis to be seen? The predominant view is a single panorama
of the whole, which can be found in many of the innumerable albums of travel
photography bequeathed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century European
travellers. The view is most often anchored by the Propylaea on one side
and the Parthenon on the other, shown from an angle in which these two
separate structures form a single profile. The most common way to take this
view was to set up the camera on what came to be called ‘the photographer’s
perch’, the area on the ‘Hill of the Muses’ to the south, on which stands a
remnant of the memorial to the Roman benefactor Philopappos. A photograph
of it from around 1880 shows a photographic camera set up directly there
(Lyons et al. 2005: 127). Placing the camera at the photographer’s perch is
to take up a position of totality, of presence seamlessly offered to the viewer,
that exemplifies the stance of much nineteenth-century travel literature and
photography of Greece and elsewhere (Bohrer 2006; Grossman, this volume;
Hamilakis 2007: 93–7). It is a position which Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘the
monarch of all I survey’ (Pratt 1992: 201–8). Pratt actually names a whole
literary genre with this category, one devoted to minute description of a
place’s past and present, made from an omniscient and unquestioned panoptic
viewpoint. But what is produced in literary accounts by lengthy description is
accomplished instantaneously by photography, and in a way seemingly artless.
As Pratt emphasises, a rhetoric of mastery is implicit to this viewpoint, which

nonetheless occludes the power relations between viewer and viewed. Such
photographs are worth a thousand words in a travel account, and comparable
to written description also for what they often withhold: the presence of
contemporary inhabitants, or even trace of their existence. Here again, the
Acropolis does not stand unproblematically for a place so much as a certain
demanded experience of a Western audience. Like other cities, such as Rome,
the particular, pristine, kind of view exemplified here by Girault de Prangey

came to dominate the image of the Acropolis in the Western photographic
imagery of it that proliferated (Szegedy-Maszak 2001). Only very occasionally,
as in a rare image by Pascal Sébah, do we see it in another framework which
not only views the Acropolis from a strikingly different angle, but also looks
across a modern railroad yard, again elaborating on the actual possibilities
of photographing the site, and the available temporalities on display for an
inquiring viewer (Hamilakis 2009; Grossman, this volume).
In all, then, as I hope this begins to suggest, the development of Western
photography of the Acropolis in the nineteenth century is dominated by a
prescribed Western ideal, around the edges of which nibbles an unbanishable
contemporaneity, always present if one just looks around the corner, or at a
different angle. The classical subject is thus distinctly malleable. The photograph
of a product of antiquity is itself the product of an interplay between the material
fact registered by the camera and the many contingencies involved in the
photographer’s choice of view and technical set-up.
Seeing
The nineteenth-century photographic image of Athenian antiquity is thus

the trace of a negotiation between factors both before and behind the lens.
Positioning the photographic opportunity in the dialectical flux between subject
and object is precisely what brings us to the work of William J. Stillman, perhaps
the greatest photographic idealist of the nineteenth century to devote himself to
the Acropolis.
Stillman’s work largely addresses the same structures of the Acropolis – the
Parthenon, Propylaea, Erechtheion – that had long been objects of attention.
But Stillman brought to the task of representing them a notable baggage of
expectation, involving not just art and aestheticisation, but also undergirded
with fundamental moral and spiritual principles. Stillman had studied painting
with Asher Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, leading figures of their time.
However, he soon found greater success as a critic, one whose guiding philosophy
blended that of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson with that of his inspiration
and later mentor John Ruskin (Ehrenkranz 1988). As founder and first editor
of the journal The Crayon, Stillman proselytised regularly for the combination of
visual and spiritual prescriptions that comprised his version of an Emersonian/
Ruskinian ideal, a quasi-religious state that often consubstantiates truth and

beauty. He clearly evaluated external appearance, however minutely captured,
not merely as entrancing for its own sake but in terms of illustrating a larger
inward and spiritual truth.
Stillman saw his attempts at painting as largely a failure, and he destroyed a
number of his early works (Ferber 1988). Instead, he was perhaps most talented
at painting with words, often in exquisite passages of transport tied to detailed
description. He had a long, successful literary career, encompassing not only

The Crayon but also publishing 14 books and more than 100 essays and reviews.
The only medium of visual expression in which Stillman felt he had reached
some success was photography, which he practiced throughout his life. Somehow
the literalness of photography offered a correlate or an opening to the literary,
often ekphrastic, method in which Stillman excelled. But this is not to say that
Stillman’s photographs are ‘literal-minded’ (in the common sense of ‘conventional’
or even ‘hackneyed’), but rather that the same analytical tendency cultivated
in detailed verbal description is evident in Stillman’s innovative, striking, and
unusual photographic views.
Published in 1870 (from photographs taken the previous year), Stillman’s
remarkable book, The Acropolis of Athens, consisted of 25 folio-size carbon prints
with minimal text, confined almost entirely to image labels. The one textual
exception is an introductory paragraph that seeks to assure us of the ‘truth’ of its
renderings, that the images were designed so as in no way to ‘diminish the outlines’
or ‘damage the architectural accuracy’ of the images of the monuments (Stillman
1870: n.p.). It goes on to state that images of façades were ‘photographed at
points exactly equidistant from the extremities.’
In this paragraph, the approach we have first seen broached by Girault de
Prangey is now articulated and applied systematically to the Acropolis and its
monuments. In the process of highlighting their equidistant-ness, Stillman’s
photographs present dramatic contrasts and at times precisely the same radical
symmetry of composition we have seen previously. At the same time, Stillman’s
conception introduces dramatic spatial expanses and a strong sense of tactility
through use of detail and delicate shading.
A view of the Parthenon from the West façade takes us on a path directly
through the building, bisecting it in a straight line, and drawing the eye on the
preferred path by positioning vertical areas of light, created mostly of negative
space for entry and exit, to balance the dark, heavy expanses of stone that
flank the composition equally on each side. This scheme is among Stillman’s
favourite for anatomising the monuments. It can be found not only in distant
views, but in a view of the Parthenon’s upper portico showing its famous frieze,
or a view through the lower portico, both made at a direction parallel to the
façade view (Fig. 4.3). These are scenes that almost provoke the viewer not just
to observe but to experience the monument, abetted by the precision of the
photographic rendering, detailing every crack and fissure, as well as the graffiti
at the far right.
Figure 4.3 William J. Stillman, ‘Western Portico of the Parthenon’, carbon

print, from The Acropolis of Athens, illustrated picturesquely and
architecturally in photography, 1870, plate 10
Source: Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University, New York, NY
Another visual scheme in Stillman’s engagement with the monuments

is that evident in a view profiling the Eastern façade of the Parthenon and
devoted to showing the subtle curve of the stylobate (Fig. 4.4).The line of
the far edge of the bottom step of the stylobate extends precisely toward the
one point of overlap of the distant horizon line, where two lines of mountain
peaks meet. This same point precisely bisects the horizontal length of the
print, honouring Stillman’s stated intention of ‘equidistant’ viewpoint. This
view creates an almost vertiginous connection from foreground to distant
background, a distance traversed by following the stylobate’s subtle curve.
This print, however, accomplishes its goal not only by means of radical
symmetry but rather the stark, asymmetrical juxtaposition of the solid view
of stones at right versus the purely empty, open spaces at left. Here again,
however, is a fundamental provocation to experience, to give the sense of almost
touching the stones as one sights across the stylobate surface into the distance.
Figure 4.4 William J. Stillman, ‘Profile of the Eastern façade, showing the
curvature of the stylobate’, carbon print, from The Acropolis of
Athens, illustrated picturesquely and architecturally in photography,
1870, plate 17
Source: Department of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Stillman’s vision of this monument, as of others on the Acropolis, accomplishes

its remarkable dynamism by relying on such contrasts, of solid versus void or
near versus far, in such a way that neither exactly dominates, but rather each
plays in dialogue with the other.
The full title of Stillman’s work is The Acropolis of Athens: Illustrated Picturesquely
and Architecturally in Photography. As Colin Eisler has noted, this bespeaks
a contradiction (Eisler 1988: 112–13; cf. Szegedy-Maszak 2005: 162–4). To
illustrate picturesquely, in nineteenth-century terms, almost inevitably hides
(for instance by placing within a frame, or in dark chiaroscuro) the details of
structure, massing and materials involved in architectural illustration. To illustrate
architecturally is to minimise picturesqueness in order to display structure itself,
making clear its boundaries and stress-points with clear lighting and full coverage.
Stillman’s photography plays, remarkably, between both modes, without ever being
precisely confined to either. It is almost obsessed with aspects of the Parthenon’s
architecture, like the stylobate, but almost never pulls back to give a simple view
of the whole building. Instead, it more often sights back much farther, to create a
grand landscape vista, which obscures knowing the building itself. Stillman seems
to have combed the grounds in quest of images to fulfill his aesthetic criteria,
which can be found in many ways in his folio. Stillman’s vision in these photos (and
many more could be adduced) seems based on choosing enticing paths in, around
and into ancient structures. They are almost theatrical sets, inviting the viewer not
just to see but to experience the spaces of Greek antiquity in an intimate, almost
phenomenological manner.
Stillman had long been interested in archaeology. He had spent much of the
previous decade in Crete,where he had even expressed interest in excavating at Knossos.
He ultimately published a number of books on Greece (and Crete), including
one explicitly entitled ‘two studies in archaeology’ (Stillman 1888). His 1870
photographs elaborate the meticulous, material vision involved in archaeological
attentiveness. While Stillman’s photographs are part of the history of commercial
imagery of the site (The Acropolis of Athens was clearly a commercial project),
they are also something more. If his work is functionally comparable to that of
other commercial photographers, its materiality and visual complexity also bear a
notable similarity to the newer, materially-informed photography then emergent
in archaeological publication, perhaps first embodied by the remarkable work of
the archaeological photographer Auguste Salzmann in the later 1850s (Salzmann
1856; cf. Bohrer 2011: 147–50; Innes 2011).
In fact, a final image by Stillman, of the Parthenon interior looking east, literally
puts the viewer into the space, gazing upon, not least, a figure seen from behind,
involved in the same contemplative viewing recommended to the photograph’s
viewer (Fig. 4.5). This is a compositional technique especially associated with
German Romanticism, notably in the work of Caspar David Friedrich which
was similarly focused on an ideal of active participation in landscape space.2 The
particular innovation here is the overt shadowing, which uses light to divide the
spectator’s zone from the distant colonnade and landscape.
This specific conception of Stillman has been particularly influential, and
not just on photography itself. Images by twentieth-century photographers such
as Frédéric Boissonnas or Walter Hege not only locate us in the same view of
the same space of this temple but have tended to play even more dramatically
with contrasts in lighting, in large part though post-exposure photographic
manipulations of a sort that Stillman himself eschewed. Even more, it is notable
that in the 30 years between the earliest photos of the Acropolis and those of
Stillman, the temple platform itself has been largely cleared of stones, an effect
which further dramatises the space. That is, over time the purifying, simplifying
vision of a brand of photography we have seen emerge nearly 30 years earlier
with Girault de Prangey, is not just a matter of photographic artifice but has real,
2
I mean especially works with an internalised viewer seen with back to the actual viewer, such
as his Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818 (Hamburg, Kunsthalle Hamburg) or Woman Before the Rising
Sun, 1818–20 (Essen, Museum Folkwang).
Figure 4.5 William J. Stillman, ‘Interior of the Parthenon, Athens’, carbon

print, from The Acropolis of Athens, illustrated picturesquely and
architecturally in photography, 1870, plate 11
Source: Avery Architectural Library, Columbia University, New York, NY
archaeological consequences on the site of the Acropolis itself, part of a project

of material national representation then paramount in Greece (Hamilakis 2001).
This says much of Stillman and the Western audiences for whom he worked
and belonged to. The Acropolis of Athens was published by a London publisher, and
largely sold there. For such an audience the monuments of the Acropolis were
virtual symbols of ancient identity, abstracted from their contemporary existence.
I have shown elsewhere how Stillman’s vision is enacted on the Acropolis monuments
in a manner that literally looks away from available traces of contemporary Greece,
a sort of hermetic, idealised practice (Bohrer 2011: 96–9). It would not be an
exaggeration to deem Stillman’s imagery an extraordinary interiorisation of the
camera’s external capability.
The remarkable formal qualities of Stillman’s photography embody his uniquely
invested mode of seeing, one deeply inculcated by the habits of description
cultivated within his aesthetic. This quality characterises Stillman’s photography
as a whole. However, it is most remarkably intense in The Acropolis of Athens,
Stillman’s largest and greatest photographic achievement. As a measure of his
investment in the site, the Acropolis is the only site to which he ever returned,
more than a decade later, to re-photograph the same monuments. For seeing, for
Stillman or anyone, is part of a larger range of experience, imbricating the sensory
in the psychological. In Stillman’s case, there is good reason to highlight the very
moment of his production of The Acropolis of Athens as one with special resonance.
Stillman’s tumultuous life leading up to the time of the Acropolis photographs
is almost a catalogue of the mass uprisings and national liberation struggles in
southern-central Europe during the 1850s and 1860s. In the 1850s, inspired by
the passionate oratory of Lajos Kossuth, Stillman had attempted to serve as a
secret agent on behalf of Hungarian nationalists working against Hapsburg
dominance. In the following decade, on postings as US consul first in Italy and
then in Crete, he was a clear partisan of, first, Garibaldi and then the leaders of the
Cretan uprising of 1866–69 (Ehrenkranz 1988; Szegedy-Maszak 2005: 158). He
was particularly involved in Crete (at the time still under Ottoman rule), so much
so that after years of close struggle he was forced to flee to Athens in late 1868,
where he watched from a distance as the independence movement he cherished
was decisively put down the following year. In the process, Stillman did not just
lose his cause and his job, but indeed his family stability. Soon after his arrival in
Athens, his neurasthenic wife descended into madness and committed suicide. He
was left as the unemployed single parent of two very young daughters, as well as
a beloved older son then in the first stages of a fatal illness. As Stillman himself
described it in retrospect ‘I was myself nearly prostrated mentally and physically,
and unfit for anything but my photography’ (Stillman 1901: 457, quoted in
Szegedy-Maszak 2005: 160). That description, however, was written over 40 years
after the event. It is the only descriptive sentence in his two-volume Autobiography
that even mentions this otherwise crucial moment.
If the cost of enacting Stillman’s vision of the Acropolis is largely excised
from the photographer’s later account, and cannot be fully discerned from the
folio itself, its traces are not absent, though they have rarely been considered.
Here, in fact, are Stillman’s own words about the experience, written just two
years after publication:
I’ve never spent time or study so profitably in this higher sense than once when I was compelled
by circumstances to spend three months photographing the ruins on the Acropolis of Athens.
I studied every view in every light until I can tell the hour, the month and the weather to take
any feature of that magnificent acre of earth […] One I photographed twenty ways until I got
it right. And so I think that a landscape photographer ought to haunt the field he has chosen in
all hours and weathers until he has found what Nature meant when she put such land and rocks
and trees together. This, to my mind, is the highest art of photography (Stillman 1872: 110).
Stillman found a ‘higher sense’, a kind of artistic purpose, on the Acropolis at

just the moment when he was deserted by most of the rest of life’s conventional
purposes. It would hardly be amiss to suggest that his desire to ‘haunt’ the site,
as ‘compelled by circumstances’, acknowledges the force of traumatic events that
might well have overtaken him. In fact, Stillman had a history of neurasthenic
attacks, including a ‘severe emotional crisis’ in 1860 that left him temporarily blind
(Ehrenkranz 1988: 19). Redoing an image many times until he ‘got it right’ suggests
an almost obsessive investment in his photographic imagery, producing a group
of works held tightly together, marked by a clear path into their virtual spaces,
an escape into a serene, established past from an inchoate, damaged present. In
Stillman’s terms, his photographic activity could surely be written as a solace wrung
through art, and the inexorable work of a Providence that he considered it to serve.
In the process of recounting and internalising his experience, and focusing
on the photographic act as much as its products, the Acropolis loses historical
specificity, or even a claim to being a product of culture. Though he calls them
‘ruins’, Stillman in his account speaks of the monuments of the Acropolis not as
historical monuments at all but solely as an example of pure landscape, one of his
lifelong aesthetic concerns. The historicist authority of the camera’s precise and
localised gaze is thus set against the universalising subjectivity behind the lens.
This situation is a link to, and a sort of agency for, the dualisms we have seen at
work throughout Stillman photographs: of substance versus void, or picturesque
versus architectural illustration. The photographic imagery ultimately presented
by Stillman is the result of a dynamic interplay between these contrasting forces.
Experiencing
Just a few years before Stillman’s work, Salzmann had written, ‘A photograph is
not just a story, but a fact endowed by convincing brute force’ (Salzmann 1856: 4;
cf. Bohrer 2005). The compelling power of Stillman’s photography is a product
not merely of factual recording, but of rhetorical force, pressed on the viewer
not only through the images themselves but their material production and
elegant presentation.3 This rhetorical force, while always latent to photography,
is here mobilised to a unique degree, one attributable in part to Stillman’s
particular situation. Stillman’s suite of Acropolis photographs is the product
of an almost compulsive photographic activity confined to one brief moment
in his life, acting on impulses and interests otherwise largely unrealised. But if
the force of Stillman’s photographs has as much unique personal resonance for
the photographer as significance for the generic Western viewer, its rhetorical
insistence on fixing ancient Greece must nonetheless be seen in the larger
context to Stillman’s experience, the Western nineteenth-century focus on its
inheritance from classical antiquity. As well anatomised by Debray, this too has
an obsessive quality. It is a condition that Martin Bernal provocatively named
‘Hellenomania’ (Bernal 1987). Though Stillman made photographs throughout
his life, none are as focused as a group, or as assertive or stand out quite so much
3
For some of the shades of photographic materiality, see Shanks 1997; Batchen 2004; Edwards
and Hart 2004; Olin 2012.
from prevailing convention. These are driven by a guiding investment in their

subject. Remarkably, when Stillman returned to the Acropolis in the 1880s, his
approach was driven exactly as before. Rather than create anew, he attempted,
and pretty closely succeeded, in redoing precisely the same views he had made
more than a decade earlier. Stillman’s imagery thus not only channels itself
toward a purified antiquity but also arrests his own temporality in perceiving it,
shutting out the actual varieties of Greek identity he himself well knew, as well
as all possible effect intervening, or external experience, between the two visits.
This is the powerful effect of the ‘brute force’ of Stillman’s purified imagery,
and key to his obsessive drive in recreating the tableaux of the Acropolis. But it
is hardly for Stillman alone that the active experience of antiquity overlaps with
deeper Western currents, which can underwrite complex slippages in distilling
imagery from the antiquities of the Acropolis. This ‘compulsion for antiquity’ can
be fundamental to seeing its artifacts (Armstrong 2005; cf. Kuspit 1989; Schorske
1991). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore in detail, Stillman’s
example, I want to suggest, opens onto the complex of Western experience of
classical antiquity, suggesting it is part of larger constellation of conflict couched
through divided or doubled perception. This kind of perception, further, bears
a notable correspondence to the nature of photographic apprehension, and
captures something of the unique viability of photography for the experience of
antiquity.
Decades after Stillman’s last visit, the potency of the archaeological subject
for a viewer was well described by another invested viewer, Sigmund Freud, in a
paper on his visit to the Acropolis in 1904. The capital of Athenian antiquity was
both revelation and challenge for Freud. Indeed, he acknowledges he waited until
he was 44 years old to make the trip, perhaps precisely because he understood at
some level what difficulties would be involved.
What Freud experienced on the Acropolis was not the tourist’s expected
pleasure. Rather, lost in its vast, bewildering scale, it produced in Freud a painful
and wrenching split consciousness. In an essay that itself was written nearly
30 years after the visit, Freud describes his reaction as divided into that of two
virtually different people. In his words ‘The first behaved as though he were
obliged […] to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed
doubtful’ (Freud 1932–36: 241). Upon further consideration, this first subject
position is attributed by Freud to his early years, particularly learning in school
about Athens and classical antiquity. As he says, ‘I do not simply recollect that in
my early years I had doubted whether I myself would ever see the Acropolis, but
I asserted that at the time I had disbelieved in the reality of the Acropolis itself ’
(Freud 1932–36: 244). This subject position, then, embodies a conflict between
present and past. It is based, as we learn later in more detail in Freud’s text, on a
pre-rational conflict stemming from his upbringing.
The second person in Freud, on the other hand, took the present sight on its
own terms, and wanted to react more conventionally to it. This subject position,
says Freud, ‘was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the
real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever
been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather some expression
of delight or admiration’ (Freud 1932–36: 241). The actuality of the Acropolis, then,
was a challenge to both subject positions, but in different ways. The place itself,
from the viewer’s standpoint, floats between these two modes of apprehending it.
Freud sees this bifurcation as a conflict, indeed a latent pathology, which he
works to understand and resolve, around the unified core of the Acropolis itself.
In the logic of photography as we have seen it here, though, there is no particular

core to cling to, rather a fractured and incomplete set of appearances, photographic
ruins of an experiential totality. Indeed, both Freudian positions have visual,
photographic correlates. Mary Bergstein has shown how formative photography
was to Freud’s conception of antiquity, certainly including his school books on
ancient Greece (Bergstein 2010; see also Leontis 1995). Freud’s second mode
sounds remarkably like that of the conventional landscape photographer, of the
sort that Stillman sought to enlighten, but also of the ‘monarch of all he surveys’
of Pratt’s formulation, who embodies the salient interests of the conventional
Western tourist.
Freud’s bifurcation in perception of the reality of the Acropolis is a deeper
than usual analysis of a quandary that besets many Western visitors. For just that
reason, it is symptomatic of a larger touristic phenomenon, inevitably abetted
by the tourist wielding a camera. Yet it also bears a striking structural link to a
premier study of photographic apprehension: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.
Barthes sees photographs within a similarly doubled kind of apprehension:
between what he terms studium and punctum. For Jacques Rancière each is an
‘absolute singularity’ in opposition to the other (Rancière 2009: 9). The work of
the two is, for James Elkins, ‘a closed system’ of mutual interference (Elkins 2011:
94; see also Batchen 2009; Olin 2012: 51–70). Most notable here, in Barthes’s
phenomenological reading, photographs do something like what the reality of
the Acropolis did for Freud: they bring out conflicting, if not contradictory
aspects of the reality they address, making it both poignant/desirable and at the
same time difficult/impossible to recuperate as one.
This brief but striking correspondence between the nature of the photographic
medium and the particular subject of antiquity broaches the possibility of larger
structural commonalities between medium and subject. I use it here only to
underline two points. First, that experiential and photographically-based seeing
are two sides of a single coin, which might be focused alternately on assembling
or pulling apart given objects and views. What is fraught and painful for Freud,
for whom the act of seeing conflicts with unquestioned feeling and memory, is
soothing for Stillman, for whom, by contrast, feeling is diffused in newly activated
seeing and antiquity is subsumed within landscape. Second, when looked at in
detail, Stillman’s photographic activities are a model for all the representations we
have considered. The sort of mental operation involved in the fixing of the image
of classical antiquity is even acted out physically, as in the literal transpositions
of photographic view, the moving around from one side to another, or staking
out of a viewing strategy through deploying objects. The choice of point of

view, the type of image made, has inevitable interior, psychological implications,
implications which could be gauged on both a personal and broader cultural
level. The Acropolis bears the impossible task of representing a vision of Western
heritage and commonality. These photographs and these viewers are a lesson in
what is at stake, the overlap between Western history and family drama, pasts
and presents, photographic process and product, and, most generally, between
the camera’s interdependent factual and subjective functions.
References
Armstrong, R.H. (2005), A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by
R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang.
Basch, S. (2011), ‘Archaeological Travels in Greece and Asia Minor: On the Good
Use of Ruins in Nineteenth-Century France’, in Z. Bahrani, Z. Çelik and
E. Eldem (eds), Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman
Empire, 1753–1914, Istanbul: SALT, 157–79.
Batchen, G. (2004), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, New York:
Princeton Architectural Press.
Batchen, G. (ed.) (2009), Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s
Camera Lucida, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bergstein, M. (2010), Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography and the History of Art,
Bernal, M. (1987), Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation,
Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Bohrer, F.N. (2005), ‘Photography and Archaeology: The Image as Object’, in
S. Smiles and S. Moser (eds), Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image,
Oxford: Blackwell, 180–91.
Bohrer, F.N. (2006), ‘Approaching Teynard’s Egypt: Photographic Encounters,
Encountering Photography’, in S. Bogen, W. Brassat, and D. Ganz (eds), Bilder.
Räume. Betrachter (Festschrift für Wolfgang Kemp), Berlin: Reimer, 408–21.
Bohrer, F.N. (2011), Photography and Archaeology, London: Reaktion.
Debray, R. (1992), Vie et mort de l’image, Paris: Gallimard.
Edwards, E. and J. Hart (eds) (2004), Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the
Materiality of Images, New York and London: Routledge.
Ehrenkranz, A. (1988), ‘William James Stillman: Painter, Critic, Photographer’
in William J. Stillman, Poetic Localities: Photographs of Adirondacks, Cambridge,
Crete, Italy, Athens, New York: Aperture, 8–27.
Eisler, C. (1988), ‘Stillman-Apostle of Art’ in William J. Stillman, Poetic Localities,
New York: Aperture, 104–15.
Elkins, J. (2011), What Photography Is, New York and London: Routledge.
Ferber, L. (1988), ‘“The Clearest Lens”: William J. Stillman and American
Landscape Painting’ in William J. Stillman, Poetic Localities: Photographs of
Adirondacks, Cambridge, Crete, Italy, Athens, New York, Aperture, 90–102.
Flusser, V. (2000), Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion.
Freud, S. (1932–36), ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’, in J. Strachey
(ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 22, London: Hogarth Press, 239–48.

Gernsheim, H. (1982), The Origins of Photography, New York: Thames and Hudson.
Hamilakis, Y. (2001), ‘Monumental Visions: Bonfils, Classical Antiquity and 19th
Century Athenian Society’, History of Photography 25(1): 5–12 and 23–43.
Hamilakis, Y. (2007), The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National
Hamilakis, Y. (2009), ‘Trasformare in Monumento: Archeologi, Fotografi e
Metamorfosi delle Rovine e Identità Culturale, Torino: B. Borringhieri, 179–94.
Innes, R. (2011), ‘Jérusalem revisited: On Auguste Salzmann’s Topography’,
Religion and the Arts 15(1): 306–37.
Kuspit, D. (1989), ‘A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and
Psychoanalysis’, in L. Gamwell and R. Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and Art:
His Personal Collection of Antiquities, Binghamton, NY: SUNY Binghamton,
133–52.
Leontis, A. (1995), Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Lyons, C., J. Papadopoulos, L. Stewart and A. Szegedy-Masak (eds) (2005),
Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, Los
Maynard, P. (1997), The Engine of Visualisation: Thinking Through Photography,
Olin, M. (2012), Touching Photographs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Osborne, P. (2010), ‘Infinite Exchange: The Social Ontology of the Photographic
Image’, Philosophy of Photography 1(1): 59–68.
Pratt, M.L. (1992), Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York
and London: Routledge.
Rancière, J. (2009), ‘Notes on the Photographic Image’, Radical Philosophy 156
( July–August 2009): 8–15.
Salzmann, A. (1856), Jérusalem, Paris: Gide and Baudry.
Schorske, C. (1991), ‘Freud: The Psycho-archaeology of Civilisations’ in J. Neu
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 8–24.
Shanks, M. (1997), ‘Photography and Archaeology’ in B. Molyneaux (ed.), The
Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, London: Routledge,
73–107.
Stillman, W.J. (1870), The Acropolis of Athens, Illustrated Picturesquely and

Architecturally in Photography, London: F.S. Ellis.
Stillman, W.J. (1872), ‘Artistic Photography’, The British Journal Photographic
Almanac and Photographer’s Daily Companion 1872: 110.
Stillman, W.J. (1888), On the Track of Ulysses; Together with an Excursion in Quest
of the So-called Venus of Melos: Two Studies in Archaeology, Made during a Cruise
among the Greek Islands, New York: Riverside.
Stillman, W.J. (1901), Autobiography of a Journalist, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.

Athens’, History of Photography 25(1): 13–22 and 23–43.
Szegedy-Maszak, A. (2005), ‘An American on the Acropolis: William James
Stillman,’ in Lyons, C., J. Papadopoulos, L. Stewart and A. Szegedy-Masak
(eds), Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites,
Los Angeles: The Getty Museum, 148–93.
Xanthakis, A.X. (1988), History of Greek Photography 1839–1960, Athens: Hellenic
Literary and Historical Archives Society.
5
Photographing the Present,

Constructed with the Past:
Pascal Sébah’s Photographic Mediation of
Modernisation in Nineteenth-century Greece

Heather E. Grossman
The photographer Pascal Sébah photographed the ancient and medieval sites of
Athens in the early 1870s, recording the monuments most visited by Europeans
while on their grand tours of the southern continent, the Mediterranean and
the Near East. Produced by a prolific commercial photographer for sale both
at his Istanbul studio and by subscription, Sébah’s pictures of Athens, like his
photographs of sites in Istanbul, were intended both as souvenirs for well-
educated, upper-class European travellers and as didactic tools for Greek and
Ottoman elites and their supporters. Several of his photographs of Athens
illustrate sites and scenes associated throughout the nineteenth century in
contemporary western European thought with a romanticised notion of a
bygone classical Greece. Dozens of Athenian scenes are found in Sébah’s oeuvre,
many of which correspond to the places guidebooks of the day stipulated could
not be missed by the serious traveller looking to rediscover ancient Greek
culture. Similarly titled images are found amongst the works of many of the
photographers of the later nineteenth-century Mediterranean, such as James
Robertson, the Bonfils ‘family’ or Petros Moraites, to name but a few. However,
unlike his predecessors and competitors, Sébah frequently framed historical
monuments with an eye to their contemporary surroundings, making seamless
visual linkages between ancient or medieval buildings and their modern urban
context. These photographs suggest that Sébah rejected the predominant visual
strategies of his day in favour of images of a modernising Mediterranean in
which the contemporary was given equal footing with the past. Sébah thus
satisfied the touristic demand for views of the sites of ancient Greece, while also
artfully providing his Greek customers and philhellenes with images that played
to their notions of burgeoning modernisation and European statehood.
113
In this chapter, I demonstrate that while working within the broad conventions
earlier established in painting and various print media depicting the remains of
the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, Pascal Sébah also used varying visual
strategies that ‘code-switched’ between romantic notions of the classical heritage
of the Mediterranean and contemporary ideological and physical manifestations
of nation-building efforts in the modern Greek state.1 For example, in some cases
Sébah, as painters, printmakers and photographers had for decades before him,
actively manipulated the framing of famed buildings such as the Parthenon in

order to obscure visual references to their modern settings, so that they appeared
in largely unoccupied, unaltered landscapes. He thus created a sense that these
were timeless monuments standing solitary in a persistent past. However, in
other instances Sébah inverted this common touristic practice of obscuring the
present context from view; he instead visually linked urban modernisation projects
directly to the past material culture of Greece’s transforming capital city. In
such photographs, Sébah highlighted contemporary Athens and its buildings in
relationship to the city’s past monuments in ways that would signal to Greeks and
philhellenes the cultural, social and political connections then being made between
ancient and Byzantine Greece and the new nation state. Sébah, by using ideological
and visual schemes determined by both local and external issues and desires, thus
simultaneously addressed multiple audiences: European touristic clientele wishing
to commemorate their overseas voyages spent exploring the ruins of the ancient
Mediterranean; armchair travellers at home in England, France and Germany,
who ordered Sébah’s prints and albums from his stock catalogue via local shops in
London and other cities (Baedeker 1889: cxvi); amateurs interested in the nascent
field of archaeology; and northwestern European philhellenes and the intellectual
and political polity of contemporary Greece who sought to enhance Athens’s
status as a new European capital.
Though only one monograph has been published about the Sébah family and its
studio, the photographers’ names are mentioned frequently, though only briefly, in
histories of photography.2 An Ottoman citizen of Syrian Catholic origin (Özendes
1999: 168),3 Pascal Sébah opened his studio ‘El Chark’ (‘the Orient’) in 1857 in
the Pera region of Istanbul, home to the major European embassies and hotels
catering to European travellers. The studio existed with differing names after his
death – from 1888 as Sébah & Joaillier, with his son, Jean-Pascal, as proprietor,
and as Foto Sabah from 1934 until it was finally closed in 1952. By at least one
count, the Sébah name is found more often than any other on photographs of the
Near East dating from 1860 to 1890 (Perez 1988: 220; Kleinbauer 1992: 650).
1
I first proposed this modernising reading of the Sébahs’s images in my Master’s thesis; see
Grossman 2001.
2
Özendes (1999) comprises the sole monograph on the Sébah studio. For other considerations
of aspects of Sébah’s work see: Thomas 1990; Grossman 2001; Woodward 2003.
3
Other sources (Çizgen 1987: 78 and 84 et al.) say only that Sébah was a ‘Levantine’; most
Ottoman photographers were members of minority populations, often Greeks or Armenians.
Photographing the present, constructed with the past 115
Pascal and Jean-Pascal Sébah photographed sites in Egypt, Turkey (Istanbul is

by far the most photographed city at over 1,300 views) and Greece, where he
primarily photographed in Athens. The firm’s work illustrates classical, Byzantine
and Islamic sites as well as city panoramas, and they were also known for their genre
portraits, including some in typically Orientalising modes. The firm’s bilingual
(French and Ottoman Turkish) promotional materials from the 1870s and 1880s
note Pascal Sébah’s awards at the Universal Expositions in Paris in 1870 and 1878
as well as medals from those in Philadelphia and Vienna (Özendes 1999: 248–
65); these languages suggest that both European and Ottoman audiences were
targeted as clientele (Ottoman elites would have read both Turkish and French).
The senior Sébah also participated in the 1873 Vienna Exhibition, for which he
was commissioned by the Ottoman Porte to illustrate Les Costumes populaire de
la Turquie, the volume presented as part of the official Ottoman imperial entry.
Thus Sébah (frequently working with Osman Hamdi, the Ottoman polymath
and founding director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum) played a role in
Ottoman imperial image making (Çizgen 1987: 78–9; on Hamdi, see Shaw 2003).
This commercial photographer was thus also skilled in the creation of official
images that served state purposes and understood the value of visual representation
in ideological debate.
While the bulk of his images were taken in Turkey, Pascal Sébah made at
least 105 photographs in Greece; most are images of classical monuments in
Athens. Almost all of Sébah’s Greek photographs are albumen prints of the same
dimensions (10.5 x 8.5 inches, or approximately 27 x 22 centimetres), and all are
signed ‘P. Sébah’ with his name, the image catalogue number and its title scratched
into the plate emulsion. Though the images are undated, elements within the
photographs themselves suggest that they were taken sometime between 1872 and
1875. The terminus post quem for the Athenian photographs is established by the
iron bands seen in a view of the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion – these were
installed in restoration work in 1872. Several images of the Acropolis show the
so-called Frankish Tower, the medieval construction adjacent to the south end
of the Propylaea, which was removed in 1874 (Lock 1987: 131; Hamilakis 2007:
89–92). If, because of their similarity in size, medium, and inscriptional style, one
accepts that all of these photographs were taken in the same campaign, the tower
provides a solid terminus ante quem for this set of images.
The typical European travel itinerary included the Acropolis with its attendant
buildings, the Temple of Hephaistos (the Theseion), the Lysicrates Monument,
the Tower of the Winds, the Arch of Hadrian and the Philopappos Monument
(Szegedy-Maszak 1987: 130; Tsirgialou, this volume), and no distinction was
made between Greek and Roman monuments. The guidebooks also mention
certain Byzantine churches (Hagioi Theodoroi, the Little Metropolis, or the
Gorgoëpikoos, and the Kapnikarea) as part of the schedule, if time permitted.
But overall, a trip to Greece was linked almost exclusively to the nation’s
ancient past, as is made clear in John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece
(1884: 8):
It is to the classical scholar that the greatest share of interest in Greece belongs. In the language
and manners of every Greek sailor and peasant he will constantly recognise phrases and customs
familiar to him in the literature of ancient Greece; and he will revel in the contemplation of the
noble relics of Hellenic architecture, while the effect of classical association is but little spoiled
by the admixture of post-Hellenic remains … We lose sight of the Venetians and the Turks, of
Dandolo and Mohammed II, and behold only the ruins of Sparta and Athens, only the country
of Leonidas and Pericles.
Building upon educated upper-class Europeans’ knowledge of ancient texts – a

staple of any standard education of the time – a trip to Athens and other Greek
locales was perceived as a chance to bring the classical world to life, often at a cost
to the travellers’ perception of modern Greece.
The later nineteenth-century European traveller’s interest in the archaeological
monuments of Athens coincided with the burgeoning of archaeology as a
‘scientific’ discipline that examined artefacts and structures in situ and as parts
of larger ensembles, with stratigraphic excavation thoroughly recorded, began in
Greece only in the 1860s. The newly established Greek Archaeological Service
undertook large-scale projects in the 1870s, such as the consolidation of the
Athenian Acropolis, and the decade also saw excavations by German, Austrian,
French and American teams. The work of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy from
1871 to 1873, Alexander Conze in Samothrace in 1873 and 1875, Ernst Curtius
at Olympia from 1875 and Theophile Homolle at Delos from 1877 produced
a great deal of new material and supplied new ways of analysing and looking
at Greece’s ancient past (Feyler 1987: 1026). Excavation publications, the first
such archaeological studies, were often illustrated with photographs (Schliemann
in particular employed photography in his Troy volume) and photolithographs
illustrated popular press coverage of these excavations. The excavations and
the images used to illustrate them captured the attention of the public because
of the spectacular nature of the recovered artefacts as well as their audience’s
predisposition to classical studies. Contemporary guidebooks of the period
published in France, Germany and Britain indicate that visitors were curious
and informed about archaeological practices, with Murray’s Guide (1884: 178)
declaring, ‘The great services which have already been rendered to archaeology
by the [German Archaeological Institute] are too well-known for detailed notice
here.’ Several guides included site abstracts written by the primary archaeologists
of a locale, or consultations about other important sites. For instance, Wilhelm
Dörpfeld and Karl Purgold, supervising excavators at Olympia, wrote much of
the section on that site for the 1889 Baedeker’s (1889: v).4 For some western
Europeans, however, a Greek trip was not just a matter of erudite learning; rather,
many travellers saw in Greece’s classical, democratic past the predecessor for their
own political selves. As Yannis Hamilakis has potently argued, the period saw:
4
By the 1909 edition, scholars from the American and British Schools of Archaeology also
wrote site entries.
An entanglement of colonial and national archaeological processes […] the colonial-cum-

national project adopted many and at times conflicting formats, and projected a range of
narratives and myths; some of its agents saw no link between the present-day population of
Greece and the ancestral past, which had now been appropriated as the past of the western
civilisation; others portrayed the present-day inhabitants as the ‘fallen from grace’ degenerate
forms of their glorious ancestors; whereas others, often described by the patronising epithet
Philhellenes, saw in the modern people of Greece the survivals of the classical heritage,
placing them thus out of time and history (Hamilakis 2007: 21).
Europeans, both those who personally made tours to Greece and those
who studied its past from the confines of their homes, fed largely from a
corresponding trough of photographic images. These often used artistic
conventions popularised by earlier antiquarians and artists. Paintings, prints
and photographs alike typically included views of monumental architecture
in timeless, sublime and often rather empty landscapes, with perhaps a small
figure or group of figures in what was considered traditional dress posed
demurely for local colour or, more practically, for scale. The languid body
posture and averted gaze of the figures can be understood to be part of a
dominant viewer/subservient subject relationship common in Orientalist and
picturesque art (Nochlin 1987: 35–7). Despite the acknowledgement from the
very development of the medium that photography was a powerful tool for
the imaging of monuments and archaeological work, and despite the common
usage of a rather more focused and clinical framing in field reports many, if not
most, commercial photographers continued the same visual conventions used
by earlier painters and lithographers when they photographed archaeological
sites (Feyler 1987: 1019–26).5
In some cases, Pascal Sébah’s images largely conform to these traditions, as
exemplified by his ‘25. Les Propylées. Vue interieure’ (Fig. 5.1). The photograph
shows two men, standing within the symmetrically framed entry of the
Propylaea on the Athenian Acropolis. Both figures are dwarfed by the high
expanse of broad stone above them, and the centred figure is almost subsumed
by the pile of blocks heaped at his left. Both men look away from the viewer,
and it is hard even to see the central figure’s features. Each wears traditional
dress: felt caps with long tassels, short cloaks, and the white foustanella skirt.
The clothing, particularly the foustanella with its voluminous folds, is vaguely
evocative of classical drapery, and reinforces ideas of tradition, solidity and
classicism. The evocative clothing and steady stances of both men heighten
the feeling of import and weight embodied by the Propylaea, a key monument
of touristic interest. Here then are the Greek peasants who the John Murray
travel guide suggested would help the European traveller recapture the lost past.
5
Photography’s application in archaeology was recognised from the outset: François Arago
highlighted such a use in his presentation of Niepce and Daguerre’s processes to the Chamber of
Deputies in France; Arago as in Goldberg 1981: 32.
Figure 5.1 Pascal Sébah, ‘25. Les Propylèes. Vue interieure’, 1872–1875
Source: © University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Image
166772
Or, are they? Perhaps, rather, these are the heroes of the new nation: one gazes
toward the ancient monuments and the other, on the photograph’s central line,
looks toward the growing capital city visible between the receding lines of the
Propylaea’s colonnade. The foustanella, worn by both men, had by the 1870s
long been associated with the idea of the modern Greek state and would have
been recognised as such by at least some sector of Sébah’s intended audience.6
Thus, in the period during which he probably was working in Greece, Sébah
worked within various visual idioms in which such a costume bore reference
not just to an imagined past based in conceptualisations of the nation’s classical
heritage, but also subtly alluded to contemporary Greek society.
While many of the contemporary travel images of Greece, including

photographic views, often retained the older, picturesque means of illustrating
monuments, there was also a more stark, illustrative photographic recording
used by contemporary excavators in their publications. A good archaeological
photograph, in the late nineteenth century as now, is one in which there is ample
light to record the detail of the subject, a viewpoint that shows depth and inclusion
of a scale: sometimes a mechanical rule but in the earlier decades of archaeological
photography more often a figure standing in the frame (Dorrell 1994: 5).7 In addition,
both tighter framing with more concern for details and multiple views of the
same structure characterise later nineteenth-century archaeological photographs.
As much as those of the picturesque, these archaeological imaging conventions
seem also to have had an effect on Sébah’s commercial travel photography (Feyler
1987: 1034–8). Even as he in some cases created more conventional compositions,
Sébah in other photographs developed an alternative image strategy that was
quite aware of and incorporated some of the photographic practices coming out
of archaeological sources. In one tightly framed image of the Pandroseion, Sébah
not only sat a worker – in ‘European’ dress – in the frame for scale, he also placed
a ruled measuring stick against the corner of the building. Sébah plates that show
the Erechtheion include not only images of the whole building, but also close,
full-frame studies of its various sculptural details.
A general view of the interior of the Parthenon, Sébah’s plate 42, illustrates
these various modes of photographing and seeing, sometimes juxtaposed in the
same image (Fig. 5.2). Sébah has placed his camera so that much of the surrounding
landscape is cropped, focusing the viewer’s attention solely on the structure rather
than on a structure in a setting. In comparison to earlier paintings of the same
view, the Sébah photograph is somewhat less romanticised than its predecessors.8
6
Costume historian Linda Welter has noted that there is no one traditional costume for Greece, but
rather many different garments that were worn by different ethnic and regional groups throughout Greece.
The foustanella, often associated with ethnic Albanians in Greece, was taken as an element of national
costume on mainland Greece after the War of Independence from 1821–29. It was adopted in appreciation
of the heroic efforts of the revolutionaries, including many ethnic Albanians, as court dress under King Otto
in the 1830s and it was still frequently worn by men in the 1880s (Welter 1995: 54, 60–61).
7
Though Feyler 1987: 1038 notes that the use of a scale (human or otherwise) was rare until the
mid-1870s.
8
See, for example, the Venetian artist Ippolito Caffi’s 1843 painting of the same view; Tsigakou
1981: 201 and fig. 32.
Figure 5.2 Pascal Sébah, ‘42. Vue Générale de l’intérieur du Parthénon’,

1872–1875
Source: © University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Image 166793
While painters often used dramatic shadows and highlights to create mood and
tension in their works, Sébah here photographs his subject in an even light that
works well to illuminate the building as a whole. Painters often included figures
– usually in traditional costume – lounging in the foreground, though commonly
the viewer cannot make out their features. Sébah, however, includes only one
figure, dressed in contemporary military attire. This man sits ramrod straight and
looks toward the west end of the cella, directly at the camera and thus the viewer.
Though he is small in the frame, he serves both as scale and as reminder of the
contemporary human inhabitants of this ancient city.
Sébah made at least one other known photograph of the interior of the
Parthenon, this time shot from the centre of the cella, isolating the northwest corner
of the structure.9 Earlier photographers, such as James Robertson, shot similar
images of the Parthenon’s interior; Robertson’s image of the cella corner rather
decorously includes figures seated amidst the ruins. Sébah’s second photograph
is unpopulated and seems to be presenting his audience with a more clinical –
9
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology Box (OV) NP S39, Item 26.
constructed, but stark – view of his subject. The work of archaeologists is evident
in the neatly piled rubble and other blocks seen at the centre of the images and
also the sculpted frieze propped against the north interior wall. Sébah’s raking light
adds depth and volume to the wall surfaces, doorway and sculpted frieze, while
Robertson’s light is quite even and flattens the surfaces in the image.
These and other photographs suggest that Sébah very carefully manipulated his
Athenian images to show a range of responses to the city’s monuments. Sébah also
consistently played with how and when he incorporated figures into his images and
the direction of the gaze and the costuming of those persons. In some cases, Sébah
directed his photographs toward both the long-standing notion of a picturesque,
classical Greece and a more pared-down, archaeological rendering of her monuments.
However, Sébah created a third type of image, using these imaging strategies as
well as elements of the modern Athenian cityscape in order to incorporate into his
images contemporary Greek political and national circumstances.
At the time that Sébah was in Athens, the modern Greek state was still in a
relative period of infancy. Established a relatively short time before by the 1832
London Protocol, the modern Greek state was for much of the nineteenth century
attempting to define its national character and struggling with boundary issues as
well. The London Protocol stipulated that the new state geographically encompass
a far smaller territory than the country’s later twentieth-century boundaries, a
point of contention that dominated Greek domestic and foreign policy into the
twentieth century (Tatsios 1984: 3; Clogg 1992: 45). From this situation arose
multiple interlocking political, territorial and cultural aspirations.
The issue of identity, as well as the desire for a geographically larger Greek nation,
became encapsulated in the Megali Idea, the ‘Great Scheme.’ The Megali Idea,
which sought to unite within the bounds of a single Greek state all those areas of the
Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean with significant Greek-speaking populations,
was a rallying point on which to base a national identity and to push for territorial
expansion. It was widely accepted among Greek citizens of various classes as well as
their European supporters (Clogg 1988: 254; reprinted as Clogg 1996: 254). The
numerous adherents of the Megali Idea typically turned to one of two historical
entities, classical Greece or the Byzantine Empire, to legitimise their visions for
modern Greece. It was not until the later nineteenth century that these two stem
roots of the Megali Idea were fully married in the intellectual and ideological realms.
Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos’s five-volume synthesis, The History of the Greek
Nation, saw its first of several editions published in instalments from 1860 to 1874
(Kitromilides 1998: 27).10 His was the first history of Greece that insisted on a fluid
continuum of the ancient, medieval/Byzantine and modern periods of the region.
Paschalis M. Kitromilides assesses the History as perhaps ‘the most important
intellectual achievement of nineteenth-century Greece’ (Kitromilides 1998: 28),
and notes that though it had detractors amongst academics, Paparrigopoulos’s text
achieved ‘an immediate broader social appeal rare in an academic work’ (Kitromilides
10
The History was reissued in a second ‘definitive’ version in 1885–87.
1998: 30). Moreover, the History had the effect of fully rehabilitating Byzantium
in the nation’s eyes and, as Kitromilides argues (1998: 29), ‘integrating it into the
continuum of Greek historical development’ by describing Byzantium in ‘familiar
terms, not as something distant in chronological and cultural time, but on the
contrary as a historical entity which had an intimacy with the society of his own time.’
This was significant not only intellectually, but also archaeologically, as through the
mid-nineteenth-century medieval remains were destroyed at an alarming rate by
official governmental decree (Frantz 1971: 26, n. 14).

While some of Sébah’s photographs subtly incorporate references to modern
Greece (such as the foustanellas worn by the two men in the his image of the
Propylaea, Fig. 5.1) several of Sébah’s other Athenian images directly contextualise
ancient monuments within a frame of the contemporary and create a more blatant
visual parallel to contemporary Greek intellectual thought. In ‘81. Perspective de
la Colonnade Sud du Temple de Thesée’ (Fig. 5.3), the camera looks down the
peristyle of the Hephaisteion, in a view similar to one William J. Stillman made
of the colonnade of the Parthenon (Stillman 1870: n.p. and Bohrer, this volume).
However, Sébah leaves the modern city faintly visible in the distance at the end of
the colonnade, as if telescoping the viewer’s experience from past to present. Legible
graffiti in both Roman and Greek scripts on the foreground columns, dated variously
to 1859, 1872 and 1873, also epigraphically call the present into this image of classical
form and balance. In another view of the whole of the Propylaea taken from the
roof of the Parthenon, Sébah manipulates his angle so that the medieval Frankish
Tower strongly balances the ancient Propylaea.11 Sébah’s high and somewhat oblique
vantage point also spatially relates the ancient and medieval monuments to the new
Observatory in the middle ground, which had been established in the 1840s on
the Hill of the Nymphs. The domed neo-classical structure is found in the centre
of the photograph and the growing city below the Acropolis can also be discerned.
The Observatory was just one new monument in a city that was largely
built – or rebuilt – in the nineteenth century. Greece’s capital was shifted from
Nafplio to Athens in 1834, at which time the city was a fairly small town. In
the next decades and with European financial aid, Athens was shaped into a
‘modern’ European capital with all of the contingent accoutrements: a new
palace, parliament, cathedral, university, academy, rebuilt ancient stadium,
national library, private residences and tree-lined squares and boulevards in the
latest European styles (Bastéa 2000: 2 and chs. 4, 5 and 6). Following the design
principles recently applied to the restructuring and modernisation of other
European capitals (Haussmann’s Paris chief among them), regulations were set
for reconstruction of the city’s infrastructure with widened roads opening into
broad squares, a modern sewer system and the introduction of a new railway line.
11
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology Box (OV) NP S 39, Group 1, Items 9 and
10 (duplicates). Hamilakis 2007: 89–90 argues that the Greek Archaeological Service was motivated
to remove the tower in 1874 as it was associated with a foreign occupation of Greece, whereas the
Frankish interregnum was likely a draw for some of Sébah’s European clientele.
Figure 5.3 Pascal Sébah, ‘81. Perspective de la Colonnade Sud du Temple de

Thesée’, 1872–1875
166837
Figure 5.4 Pascal Sébah, ‘18. L’Acropole vue prise de la gare de Chemin de
Fer’, 1872–1875
Source: © University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Image 166767
Guidelines were created that governed the height and façade appearance of the
new public and private buildings that were to line these boulevards, and efforts
were made to isolate historic monuments in order to make them focal points in
the new cityscape. Though on a smaller, more piecemeal scale than in Paris or
other capitals, the Greek government thus sought to make Athens a modern city
to represent the new nation state (Bastéa 2000: 106–17).
In several photographs Sébah makes strong visual parallels between
archaeological monuments extant in Athens and the burgeoning modern
capital, on a par with the parallels made in other spheres by intellectuals such as
Paparrigopoulos. One example, ‘No. 18. L’Acropole vue prise de la gare de Chemin
de Fer’ (Fig. 5.4), as the caption implies, shows the whole of the Acropolis and
the Hephaisteion below, taken from the northwest. This was a fairly common
vantage point, though Sébah’s treatment of the site is quite different from others’
(even the title suggests a different focus). The Hephaisteion is at the centre of the
composition, visually linked by a strong diagonal axis and further related through
scale to the Parthenon above. To the left – on an almost equal sight line – and
below the Acropolis walls spread the modern buildings of the Plaka, Athens’
town centre, then comprised of mainly new, mid-nineteenth-century buildings.
Most interestingly, Sébah has prominently highlighted in the foreground the

tracks and fence leading at an opposing diagonal to the train shed of the Theseion
Station, the Athenian terminus of the Athens-Piraeus train line that had been
completed in 1869, only a few years before the photograph was taken.12 Sébah
piles on further parallels between these ancient and modern fixtures of the city.
One full half of the composition is given over to the train tracks and fence, which
thus compete hierarchically for the viewer’s spatial awareness. The sloped roofline
of the train shed at far left echoes the lines of the temples’ pediments. Further,
the strong verticals of the colonnades of the Parthenon and Hephaisteion are
reinforced by those of the rail yard’s fence-posts. Indeed, whereas at first the fence
seems to draw the viewer’s attention away from the ancient monuments toward
modern industrial achievements, Sébah’s careful framing strongly establishes a
visual continuity between the classical and contemporary by creating a parallel
between the fence and the lines of the temples’ northern facades. Finally, the piles
of unused railroads ties and other materials next to the barrier recall the abundant
stone rubble on the Acropolis itself, and the reconstruction of both these areas of
the city. While at the Acropolis the enormous amounts of architectural detritus
call forth the ruined (though by then conserved and consolidated) state of the
ancient monuments, the spare elements here evoke not a bygone classical past
but the progressive construction of the new Greek state.13
Sébah not only manipulated the image of classical buildings in his photographs,
medieval monuments were treated similarly. In his photograph of the church of
Hagioi Theodoroi, Sébah visually fixes the Byzantine component of the Megali
Idea, and as Kitromilides argued of Paparrigopoulos’s contemporary text (1998: 29),
the image ‘contributes to the incorporation of the Byzantine past into the frame
of reference of his [viewer’s] identity.’ Sébah’s ‘88. Église Byzantine St. Théodore’
(Fig. 5.5) is compelling in its nearly simultaneous assertion of this relationship.
Sébah photographs the medieval church as virtually contiguous with the
modern Athenian streets beyond – streets that had recently been widened
and lined with new houses. The church is shown from the east end, as if to
highlight both its identity as an Orthodox Christian monument as well as the
age and beauty of the Middle Byzantine construction. Sébah seems concerned
with showing the building to its best advantage, positioning the camera so
as to allow the strong sunlight to play off of the massed geometric forms of
the church. The camera position and overall composition become even more
deliberate upon closer inspection of the spatial and visual relationships Sébah
establishes between Hagioi Theodoroi and the surrounding buildings. The
church, modestly scaled in actuality, is somewhat aggrandised in the photograph
through the use of a broad, empty foreground (true, too, in actuality, as the
immediate surroundings had been cleared of older, neighbouring structures).
12
Travlos 1972: map XVIIIa. For a more comprehensive discussion of this railway line, see
Papayannakis 1982: 47–52.
13
Compare with Bohrer, Tsirgialou and Hamilakis, this volume.
Figure 5.5 Pascal Sébah, ‘88. Église Byzantine St. Théodore’, 1872–1875
166844
Sébah has also manipulated the visual scale of those buildings that were visible
near the church, closely equating parts of Hagioi Theodoroi to other components
of its surrounding environment. The narthex roof is the same height as the
roofline of the buildings in the right background, the roof height of the north
arm of the church is equal to that of the structure diagonally across the street
and the joint of the south apse and belfry coincides with the roofline of the
house behind.
The visual symbiosis of the Byzantine structure and modern, neo-classical
surrounding buildings is most evident in the tightly directed view down the street to
the west. The north facade of the church, seen in a long oblique view, melds almost
seamlessly into the line of the one- and two-storey neoclassical buildings beyond and
creates an open-ended corridor down which the viewer’s eye passes. Significantly, the
viewer is not the only one traversing this connecting space. Several ‘ghosts’ – those
persons who were not stationary long enough to fully register on the photographic
plate due to the long exposure times of earlier photographic processes – can be seen
where the narrower street meets the open square, which the viewer perceives as his or
her space. These shadowy figures convey a sense of motion, of the passing of time and
of the fluidity between present and past.14 However, about halfway down the street,
two men stand talking, both nattily attired in what seems to be the latest fashion.
Their presence, fully caught by the camera, furthers the viewer’s sense that he or she
is looking through the frame of a past monument into his or her own society.
In his images of Greece, Sébah often shows the past – whether the ancient
or medieval, in a damaged or whole state – in direct relationship to and as part
of modernisation and progress. We have no written documents recording Pascal
Sébah’s knowledge of Greek national politics, but the photographer’s images seem
to reflect an engagement with touristic, archaeological and national issues of the day.
In so doing, Sébah’s photographs seem to have strong ideological content reflective
of both the environment in which they were made and of the multiple audiences
to whom the photographs were sold. This does not suggest that Sébah personally
supported such causes. Rather, Sébah, at least as well and in many cases more so
than his photographic counterparts and commercial rivals, carefully constructed his
photographs to ‘code-switch’ and to tap into his varied clients’ desires and needs, a
skill perhaps honed in his work for both the Ottoman government and with the
archaeologist-statesman Osman Hamdi. Though he created many examples of
Orientalising or romanticised images for commercial sale, Pascal Sébah (and his
son after him, it should be noted) also played with and nuanced the stereotypes
of the travel genre. He simultaneously isolated ancient and medieval monuments
in an archaeological fashion and incorporated them into modern, rather than
ruined, landscapes. He frequently captured people in contemporary, European-style
dress but also showed figures in traditional costumes (that still would have read
contemporary to some) with gazes turned on the viewer rather than toward a distant
and imagined past. Such photographs were likely steeped in particular climates, but
they were also commercially savvy products that appealed to diverse clients. Sébah’s
carefully crafted travel photographs of Athens thus are subtle politically, culturally
and economically charged interpretations of temples and train sheds.
References
Arago, F. (1981), ‘Bill Presented to the Chamber of Deputies, France, June 15,
1839’, in V. Goldberg (ed.), Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the
Present, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 32–3.
Augustinos, O. (1994), French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from
the Renaissance to the Romantic Era, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Baedeker, K. (1889), Greece, Handbook for Travellers, Leipzig: Karl Baedeker.
Bastéa, E. (2000), The Creation of Modern Athens, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
14
Rice 1997: 88, gives a contrary evaluation of the ‘ghosts’ in Charles Marville’s images of Paris. Rice
feels that they seem to make the photographs more static, by highlighting what she calls different ‘time zones.’
Çizgen, E. (1987), Photography in the Ottoman Empire 1839–1919, Istanbul: Haset

Kitabevi.
Clogg, R. (1988), ‘The Byzantine Legacy in the Modern Greek World: The Megali
Idea’, in L. Clucas (ed.), The Byzantine Legacy in Eastern Europe, Boulder: East
European Monographs, 253–81. [Reprinted in R. Clogg (1996), Anatolica:
Studies in the Greek East in the 18th and 19th Centuries, London: Variorum
Reprints, 253–81.]
Clogg, R. (1992), A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.
Constantinou, F. and A. Tsirgialou (2004), Athens 1839–1900: A Photographic
Record, Athens: Benaki Museum.
Dorrell, P. (1994), Photography in Archaeology and Conservation, Cambridge:
Feyler, G. (1987), ‘Contribution à l’histoire des origines de la photographie
archéologique: 1839–1880’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Antiquité
99(2): 1019–47.
Frantz, A. (1971), The Church of the Holy Apostles in Athens, Princeton: American
School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Grossman, H.E. (2001), ‘Imaging the Easts: Pascal and Jean-Pascal Sébahs’
Photographs of Istanbul and Athens in the Archives of the University
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’, Master’s Thesis, University of
Pennsylvania.
Kitromilides, P.M. (1998), ‘On the Intellectual Content of Greek Nationalism:
Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino
(eds), Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Aldershot: Ashgate, 25–33.
Kleinbauer, W.E. (1992), ‘Appendix: Nineteenth-Century Photography of Early
Christian and Byzantine Architecture’, in Early Christian and Byzantine
Architecture: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston: Reference Publications in Art
History, 635–70.
Lock, P. (1987), ‘The Frankish Tower on the Acropolis, Athens: The Photographs
of William J. Stillman’, The Annual of the British School at Athens 82: 131–3.
Murray, J. (1884), Handbook for Travellers in Greece, London: John Murray.
Nochlin, L. (1989), ‘The Imaginary Orient’, in The Politics of Vision: Essays on
Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, New York: Harper and Row, 33–59.
Özendes, E. (1999), From Sébah and Joailler to Foto Sabah: Orientalism in
Photography, Istanbul: YKY.
Papantoniou, I. (1981), Greek Costumes, Nafplion: Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation.
Papayannakis, L. (1982), Οι ελληνικοί σιδηρόδρομοι – γεωπολιτικές, oικονομικές
και κοινωνικές διαστάσεις, Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank.
Perez, N. (1988), Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885), New
York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc.
Shaw, W. (2003), Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualisation
of History in the Late Ottoman Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stillman, W.J. (1870), The Acropolis of Athens, Illustrated Picturesquely and
Architecturally in Photography, London: F.S. Ellis.
Szegedy-Maszak, A. (1987), ‘True Illusions: Early Photographs of Athens’,
The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 15: 125–38.
Tatsios, T.G. (1984), The Megali Idea and the Greek-Turkish War of 1897: The Impact
of the Cretan Problem on Greek Irredentism, 1866–1897, Boulder: East European

Monographs.
Thomas, R. (1990), ‘Sébah and Joaillier’, History of Photography 14 ( January–
March): 87–8.
Todorova, M. (1997), Imagining the Balkans, New York: Oxford University Press.
Tomlinson, R.A. (1987), ‘The Acropolis of Athens in the 1870s: The Evidence of
the Alma-Tadema Photographs’, The Annual of the British School at Athens 82:
297–304.
Tsigakou, F.-M. (1981), The Rediscovery of Greece: Travelers and Painters of the
Romantic Era, New Rochelle: Caratzas Brothers.
Welter, L. (1995), ‘Ethnicity in Greek Dress’, in J.B. Eicher (ed.), Dress and
Ethnicity: Change Across Space and Time, Oxford: Berg, 53–77.
Woodward, M.L. (2003), ‘Between Orientalist Clichés and Images of
Modernisation’, History of Photography, 27: 363–74.
Yiakoumis, H. (1997), La Grèce: Voyage photographique et littéraire au XIXe siècle,
Athens: Bastas-Plessas.

131
Part II
Alternative Histories
Photographic Narratives,

6
The Photographic and the Archaeological:

The ‘Other Acropolis’
Yannis Hamilakis and Fotis Ifantidis
It is becoming increasingly accepted that the invention of photography was a long

process rather than a single event, and that what Batchen has called ‘the desire to
photograph’ (1997) had preceded the public declaration of the launch of the new
technology. One moment, however, which has acquired immense importance
in this long process is the famous speech delivered by the French physicist,
politician and director of the Paris Observatory, François Arago, to the French
Chamber of Deputies, on 3 July 1839.1 The speech was aimed at persuading
the Chamber to buy Daguerre’s invention and grant him a pension, and as he
was speaking, Arago passed around images of famous Parisian monuments and
landmarks such as Notre Dame and Pont Neuf. In a rather orientalising tone, he
emphasised strongly the benefits of the new technology in the effort to produce
exact facsimiles of monuments, and bring ‘home’ archaeological treasures, or at
least their photographic depictions:
Upon examining several of the pictures to be submitted for your inspection all will consider
the immense advantages which would have been derived, during the expedition to Egypt for
example, as a means of reproduction so exact and so rapid: all will be struck by this reflection
that if photography had been known in 1798, we should this day have possessed faithful
representations of many valuable antiquities now, through the cupidity of the Arabs, and the
vandalism of certain travelers, lost forever to the learned world. To copy the millions and
millions of hieroglyphics which entirely cover to the very exterior the great monuments at
Thebes, Memphis, Carnac, etc., would require scores of years and legions of artists. With the
Daguerréotype, a single man would suffice to bring to a happy conclusion this vast labor (Arago
1889 [1839]: 242–3).
1
Arago had first announced the discovery to the French Academy of Sciences on 7 January,
1839, but the July speech was the first, full-scale report (Levitt 2009: 153–5).
133
Even before this speech, however, the Gazette de France, in its first description of
the invention on 6 January 1839, would declare: ‘Travellers, you will soon be able,
perhaps, at the cost of some hundreds of francs, to acquire the apparatus invented
by M. Daguerre, and you will be able to bring back to France the most beautiful
monuments, the most beautiful scenes of the whole world’.2
Across the English Channel, Fox Talbot, the other key figure in the invention
of the medium, was also known for his antiquarian interests, had done much work
on Assyriology and had published a number of important translations of cuneiform

texts (Schaaf 2000: 28). In the publication where he announced the invention of
‘the new art of photogenic drawing’, The Pencil of Nature (1844), he would comment
how ancient statues are particularly suitable for the new medium: ‘Statues, busts, and
other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic
Art; and also very rapidly, in consequence of their whiteness’ (1844, n.p.).
The apparatuses of photography and archaeology were thus linked right from
the start, and as we will try to show below, the associations are much deeper than
the rhetorical pronouncements of its pioneers. It is thus surprising that there is
still relatively little discussion on the shared ontological and epistemic principles
of the two domains, the photographic and the archaeological.3 In this chapter,
we will start by exploring briefly the collateral development of archaeology and
photography as two key devices of capitalist modernity, before we proceed to
present an alternative mode of photographic-cum-archaeological production,
and one which can be characterised as counter-modern. Our general points and
thoughts will be grounded on one of the most photographed archaeological locales
worldwide, the Athenian Acropolis.
Photography and archaeology as collateral devices of modernity
In the very same year that the invention of the daguerreotype was publicly announced,
1839, the Acropolis became the subject of a series of images, by the merchant Joly
de Lotbinière (cf. Bohrer, Tsirgialou, this volume). He was in the audience when
Arago gave his speech, and immediately acquired the invention. Lotbinière, who
preserved in his photographs the last remnants of the small Ottoman mosque inside
the Parthenon, inaugurated the long history of photographic depiction of the site.
2
The text was written by H. Gaucheraud, and the translation is by B. Newhall; it is reproduced
in Newhall 1980: 17–18.
3
It is encouraging that in recent years there has been an extensive discussion on the links
between archaeology and photography, as well as attempts to make the most of the creative possibilities
of the medium, beyond documentation; see, for example, Shanks 1997; Hamilakis 2001, 2008, 2009;
Bateman 2005; Lyons et al. 2005; Downing 2006; Houser 2007; Hamilakis et al. 2009; Guha 2010;
Baird 2011; Bohrer 2011; Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2013; Ifantidis 2013. But very few studies explore
the philosophical and epistemic reasons for this close association and their mutual and collateral
constitution as visual devices of western, capitalist modernity.
The photographic and the archaeological 135
In the decades to come, his steps would be followed by countless commercial and
other photographers who, especially after the invention of the negative-positive
process, and, later, in the 1850s, of the albumen print, would create a new visual and
material economy, based on the dissemination of photographic-cum-archaeological
objects. We have argued elsewhere (Hamilakis 2001, 2008, 2009a, 2009b) that
this photographic production went hand-in-hand with the archaeological
production of the site as the sacred locus of Hellenic national imagination. Since
the foundation of the modern Greek state in the 1830s, the Acropolis, which was
seen as the most important archaeological monument for the new state, and the
most sacred ancient locale in the national imagination, became the central focus of
an extensive campaign. Archaeologists on the ground were engaged in processes of
clearing, demolition, reconstruction and rebuilding and exhibition. In other words,
they were clearing the site of all ‘matter out of place’, material traces that did not
fit in with the dream of a sacralised, classical site: Ottoman, Frankish or other
buildings, mnemonic traces of the rich and multi-faceted biography of the site,
but ones that evoked dark spots in the national narrative. They also completely
rebuilt some monuments, such as the small temple of Athena Nike. Taking place
in 1835–36, this was the first, complete restoration of an archaeological monument
by the new state (Mallouhou-Tufano 1998: 20–22). The temple had been destroyed
by the Ottomans in the seventeenth century, who used the building material to
reinforce the fortification of the Acropolis on the eve of Morosini’s attack. Its
fragments were found amidst the rubble when demolishing one of the bastions in
the Propylaea, and the rebuilding project acquired immense symbolic importance
for the new nation state, standing for the re-emergence of Hellas from the ruins
of the Ottoman regime, after the War of Independence (Hamilakis 2007: 93–4).
But the wholly reconstituted temple also became one of the most photogenic
sights on the Acropolis and has been photographed endlessly, portrayed mostly
in splendid isolation, and from an angle that enhances and exaggerates its size.
Archaeologists, architects, and other scholars, starting with Ludwig Ross and Leo
von Klenze who belonged to the entourage of the first Bavarian King of Greece,
were producing a monumentalised site, a landscape of oblivion, a site and a sight
ready for visual inspection and dissemination (cf. Hamilakis 2007).
Photographers in their turn found in this process of monumentalisation, ready-
made themes, which were staged and framed for them by archaeologists. They,
of course, carried out their own process of photographic monumentalisation, by
further isolating classical monuments, by framing out traces of contemporary
life, and where possible, all remnants of other material presences beyond the
classical, by producing, in other words, a standardised classical gaze which was
objectified and materialised on paper. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
it seems that a photographic rendering of the Acropolis followed a more or less
fixed pattern: photographers followed a standard itinerary, and from the vast range
of monuments, buildings and artefacts scattered on and around the Acropolis, a
few selected ones became the most favoured, and these were photographed from
specific angles, over and over (cf. Szegedy-Maszak 2001; Tsirgialou, this volume).
The photographs of the Acropolis were sold by catalogue individually or as part

of photo-albums and became desirable souvenirs for both visitors to the site and
armchair travellers. Demand for such photographs amongst the European middle
classes coincided with the emergence of leisure time and of the new phenomenon
of tourism in the nineteenth century.
There were, of course, exceptions to this photographic canon. Some nineteenth-
century commercial photographers, for example, would produce, in addition to the
static and standardised photographs of isolated monuments, images that would

include signs of contemporary life and sights of modernisation, such as railway
lines. Pascal Sébah is a case in point here (see Grossman, this volume), and one
could also mention Greek photographers such as Constantin Athanasiou. The
work of Stillman is also an exception, foregrounding a more phenomenological
and fully embodied rendering of the monuments of the Acropolis. But his output
was part of a rather different trajectory, not being a commercial photographer,
and having a rather idiosyncratic personal, aesthetic and political background
(see Bohrer, this volume).
Despite these exceptions, however, which deserve a thorough and in-depth
investigation, the commercial photographic production and dissemination of
the Acropolis speaks of a photographic canon which was created alongside, and
in collaboration with, the archaeological canon. This commercial photographic
production responded to the demand for certain stereotypical views on classical
monuments, and at the same time reinforced and disseminated them further.
These were the sights of monumentalised sacred icons, standing isolated on a
terra nullius4 on a country that was not seen (by the European middle classes and
many of their scholars) as part of European modernity. It is no coincidence that
Athenian photographs, of the mid to late nineteenth century, by the Beirut-based,
French photographer Félix Bonfils and his family were often sold as part of the
five-volume album, Souvenirs d’Orient (cf. Hamilakis 2001). This was the classic
colonial scheme of what Fabian has called ‘allochronism’, or the ‘denial of co-
evalness’ (1983): the belief that the country that was now modern Greece belonged
to another time, and it did not participate in the temporality of western European
modernity; it was rather a landscape of ruins, structured and defined by the
temporality of the classical. This was also a colonial gaze which monumentalised,
both photographically and archaeologically, the crypto-colony that the modern
state of Greece was becoming (cf. Herzfeld 2002). Allusions to classical authors
and to biblical sources were evident in many of the photographs, allusions that the
educated middle classes that consumed this photographic production would have
been able to decipher.
The photographic-mechanical hyper-production of the Acropolis, despite
Walter Benjamin’s expectations (2008), did not in fact diminish its aura, but
rather had the opposite effect: it led to its further mystification. The Acropolis
4
This well-known term, deriving from Roman law, denotes in recent discussion the European
colonisation of ‘empty’ lands, thought of belonging to no one.
became the original of a myriad of reproductions. The dissemination of countless

photographic images of the monument certainly made its material presence
better known amongst the European middle classes. But these were the mostly
sanitised images of an object which was becoming more and more isolated,
cordoned off by archaeology and experienced, even by the people who visited the
site, primarily through the sense of distant, autonomous vision, reinforcing further
its appreciation as an exclusively visual, non-material icon.5 This prevailing sense
of dematerialisation is responsible for the ‘disturbance’ that Freud experienced

on his visit to the site, when he would realise that the icon he had grown up with,
the glorified entity that dominated the imagination of middle and upper classes
and their scholars for several centuries, did indeed exist and had a physical and
tangible character, not simply a phantasmic one (Freud 1932–36; cf. also Bohrer,
this volume).
Jonathan Crary (1992) has shown that photography materialised a new
technique for the management of attention, and one that was part of the
broader regime of capitalist modernity. Unlike earlier scopic regimes, embodied
by technologies such as the camera obscura, photography realised a sense of
autonomous vision, which was lodged on the mobile body of the observer; more
importantly, it was based on the new cultural economy of value and exchange. The
reproducibility of photography meant that photographs can and have operated as
currency in this new visual economy (cf. Poole 1997; Sekula 1981). To quote Sekula
(1981: 23), ‘[l]ike money, the photograph is both a fetishised end in itself and a
calibrated signifier of a value that resides elsewhere, both autonomous and bound
to its referential function’. Archaeology, as another device of capitalist modernity,
has attributed financial value to antiquities rendering them commodities, although
their entanglement with ideas of nationhood, in the case of Greece as elsewhere,
meant that their monetary exchange had to be curtailed; not only because they were
now the property of the nation, but also because they became sacralised, venerated
icons in the national imagination (cf. Hamilakis 2007). Their sacred connotations
thus were at odds with over-commercialisation and monetary exchange. Western
travellers could no longer freely appropriate or easily purchase ancient works of art,
as the nation states which were founded in the nineteenth century declared them
national property and protected them; instead, they could purchase photographic
depictions of them.
Barthes (1981: 93) notes that the same century invented photography
and history, but the same can be said of modern, professional archaeology.
At the moment of their collateral inception, photography and professional
archaeology shared the epistemological certainties of western modernity: the
principle of visual evidential truth (‘seeing is believing’), the desire to narrate
things ‘as they really were’ and the idea of objectivism. By this we mean that
5
Photographs, of course, as we will discuss later, can activate tactile, even multi-sensorial
performances, but to what extent this potential was materialised by most people, given the distancing
effects of the aura of the monument within the western imagination, is debatable.
both archaeology and photography objectified, in both senses of the word:

archaeology produced, through selective recovery, reconstitution and restoration
of the fragmented material traces of the past, objects for primarily visual
inspection; and photography transformed these into photographic objects. The
notions of spectacle and surveillance lie at the core of both, whether dealing
with museum exhibitions, or the meticulous recording of things and other
inanimate and animate beings, and their careful classification into taxonomies:
the distance between the police mugshot and the photograph of a rare artefact
captured by archaeologists, is a short one indeed (cf. Tagg 1988). Archaeology
and photography both partake of what Bennett (1995) calls, the ‘exhibitionary
complex’, or what Heidegger called a fundamental event of modernity, that is
‘the conquest of the world as picture’ (1977: 134). Photography also facilitated
a fundamental illusion of the modernist, especially national, imagination: the
re-collection, the bringing together of things (in the form of their photographic
representations), and the creation and reconstitution of the whole, of the corpus,
of a national or archaeological totality (cf. Hamilakis 2007). Yet despite these
dominant developments, western modernity, far from being a monolithic entity,
harboured diverse gazes and visual regimes. Other, vernacular modernities came
into existence, both within and outside the European core, and their take on
photography, including the consumption of photographic objects, were and are
quite diverse (cf. Lydon 2005; Pinney 2001; Pinney and Peterson 2003; Wright
2004). Professional and modernist archaeological cultures were also expressed in
diverse ways, but were also constrained at the same time by the elite character of
the enterprise.
Above everything else, a fundamental notion that connects archaeology with
photography is that of time and temporality. Both apparatuses attempted to
freeze time: photography by capturing and freezing the fleeting moment,6 and
archaeology, through conservation, restoration and other processes, by arresting
the social life of things, buildings and objects, and attempting to reconstitute
them into an idealised, originary state, into an eternal monumentalised moment.
The linguistic allusions made by commentators such as Bazin (1960) point
to another existential-cum-temporal association: the notion of death. It is no
coincidence that in the nineteenth century, the launch of photography was
described by a number of commentators as necromancy (communication with the
dead) (Batchen 1997: 92), and that the links between death and photography are
regularly encountered in photographic discourses, including canonical writings,
most notably in Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1981), but also in the writings of
Jacques Derrida (see below; cf. also Cadava 1997: 11). Likewise, archaeology
in modernity is also a form of ‘communication with the dead’, through their
material remnants.
But this temporal association between the two also provides an opening
for a reconfigured relationship: both archaeology and photography connect
6
Photography ‘embalms time’, notes Bazin 1960: 8; cf. also Berger and Mohr 1982: 86.
past and present, or rather bring them together side by side, they enable and
engender a communication and a dialogue between the two. In other words,
they both have the potential to act as multi-temporal processes and devices.
Photography, Batchen notes (1997: 92), ‘seems to offer a temporal experience
significantly different from that provided by the previous media’, and points
to the ‘photograph’s peculiar characteristics, in particular its ability to bring
past and present together in one visual experience’. Archaeology deals with
things that were produced and shaped in the past, but continue to live and exist
in the present; their durational qualities enact multiple times simultaneously
(cf. Bergson 1991; Hamilakis 2013; Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008). It is this
enormous potential, that both domains have, that is the ability to disrupt the
linear, sequential and successive temporality of modernity, which made Barthes
note that photography causes a ‘disturbance (to civilization)’ (1981: 12). We
argue that such a ‘disturbance’ holds immense promise for future collaborative
engagements of the photographic and the archaeological, in engendering
alternative forms of temporal understandings.
Multi-temporality thus provides a shared ontological basis for archaeology
and photography, but the two domains also share a grounding on materiality,
sensoriality and memory, notions closely connected. Photographs are material
memories of the things, persons and events experienced by the photographic
apparatus, and archaeology is a mnemonic practice, an attempt to re-collect
the material fragments from diverse times. Remembering and forgetting are
engendered through the sensorial experience of material things, including
photographs. Indeed, one of the most interesting recent developments
in photographic theory is the treatment of photographs as evocative and
sensorial material things, not simply as disembodied visual signifiers. Such an
understanding finds support in recent research on the history and anthropology
of photography. As Batchen (2004) has shown, the mnemonic and affective
import of photographs is often enhanced with their embellishment (by their
‘handlers’) with other artefacts, as well as human hair and odorous plants
(cf. Olin 2012). Furthermore, a number of anthropologists have recorded the
diverse material practices involving photographs, their reworking, embodied
appreciation, partial modification or destruction, and their investment with
agency and often supernatural power (cf. Edwards 2001, 2009; Pinney and
Peterson 2003; Edwards and Hart 2004; Wright 2004). It was especially its tactile
properties that encouraged Walter Benjamin (2008) to celebrate photography as
the new mimetic technology that could enrich the human sensorium, acting as a
prosthetic sensory device (Buck-Morss 1992; Taussig 1993).
This refocusing of the discussion allows us to move away from the original,
shared ontological and epistemic principles of archaeology and photography as
scientific devices that record and thus preserve and disseminate evidential truths,
and accept instead their role as processes of production (cf. Derrida 2010a: 44–5).
Developments in photographic technology, especially the advent of the digital
era and the widespread computer manipulation of images, has made it easier
to treat the photographic processes as creative production, rather than as pure

recording. The acknowledgement, in recent years, of the contingent character
of the archaeological process and of the role of the archaeologist as cultural
producer rather than as an objective scientist (cf. Hamilakis 1999; Shanks and
McGuire 1996), has had a similar effect. Both archaeology and photography
produce material artefacts which, by virtue of their materiality, invite a fully-
embodied, multi-sensorial and kinaesthetic encounter. To put it another way,
the photographic and the archaeological will need to be re-conceptualised as

homological processes within the fields of materiality, memory, and temporality,
rather than the conventionally opted for, fields of visual studies and vision-
oriented art history, within the discourse of objectivity and scientific accuracy.
Their originary and ancestral links can be transformed into a creative association
which may lead to collaborative projects with significant aesthetic, social and
political potential. This is what we have attempted in The Other Acropolis project,
which we discuss below.
Persistent memories
But what about the Acropolis? Have other, more recent works countered its
photographic monumentalisation? Indeed, given its continuous archaeological
monumentalisation, and given that both the site and the new Acropolis museum
continue to be landscapes and museo-scapes of oblivion (cf. Hamilakis 2011),
can we produce a photographic material culture which can work against this
prevailing process? Time limitations prevent a long exposure of the countless
recent photographic renderings of the site, and we will only mention briefly two,
before we proceed to present our own project. The first is the work Metoikesis by
Lizzie Calligas who recorded the transfer of antiquities from the old Acropolis
museum to the new one, in 2007–08. She was given unique access to the delicate
archaeological and conservation process of packing and transferring the objects
from one locality to the next, and has produced a series of evocative images
which afford multiple readings. For her exhibitions in Athens and Thessaloniki in
2010–11, she chose a small number of photographs depicting mostly the Archaic
Korai (female statues), wrapped up in protective clothing and held together by
masking tape (Fig. 6.1).
The statues are projected in splendid isolation with little or no indication of
their surroundings, no signs of the archaeologists and conservators who were
working on and with them, and mostly on a black, white or grey, at times fuzzy
and blurred background. The project had a special, emotive significance for the
artist, since, as she notes, the Acropolis Museum was her favourite one, and she
had spent many hours there over several visits. Her imagery and, more so, her
own commentary on this work, cite the well-known national mnemonic topos
that sees ancient statues as living and breathing beings, a topos that originates
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not before (cf. Hamilakis 2007):
Figure 6.1 Two photographic projects on the Acropolis: J-F. Bonhomme’s

book project with Jacques Derrida on the left and Lizzie Calligas’s
Metoikesis on the right
I [...] felt a sting of melancholy at the thought that the Korai would now have to leave the
rock of the Acropolis for the first time in almost two and a half millennia – it seemed to
me that they were being uprooted from where they naturally belonged […] The space of
the old museum now looked like a hospital, or a vast operating room. Conservators and
archaeologists in white gloves quietly moved about the antiquities, following the instructions
of a meticulously thought-out plan, doing what had to be done […] Beneath their cover of
white fabric the statues seemed mysterious and oddly alive. I made up stories about them and
used my camera to translate into image all that I saw and felt (Calligas 2010a: 115).
The tropes of living and breathing statues who are being uprooted from their
home (especially when these statues are forced to live in ‘exile’) are central to the
national imagination. Moreover, archaeologists and conservators here became the
medical professionals who perform the necessary surgical operations, in order to
heal the trauma of the uprooting from a millennia-old home. They are also the
ritual specialists who would make sure that the vulnerable bodies of the Korai
do not suffer any pollution – another key theme in the national imagination – in
this traumatic process, hence the white, surgical gloves. But in the contemporary,
globalised visual landscape, these images cannot but recall some other imagery, and
some more disturbing events and locales. We have in mind other bodies that, for the
past 15 years or so, haunt our memories, and even our dreams: Muslim women in
Afghanistan wearing the burka; dead bodies in Iraq, Afghanistan or other Middle
Eastern countries shrouded in a mostly white cloth, according to the Islamic
funerary custom; or the images of the hooded, tortured prisoner in Abu Ghraib in
Iraq, standing on a crate, wearing a sheet or a piece of cloth, arms extended, and
electrodes attached to his fingers. It is the sight of faceless isolated bodies, wrapped
up in white or grey clothing and masking tape that provokes these connections.
Given these inevitable associations, and the fact that, as one commentator notes
(MacDonald 2010: 21), the underlying theme here is displacement, can these
images also operate as an artistic intervention on the fate and continuous suffering
of recent immigrants to Greece from Asian and African countries, mostly Muslim
in religion? It is hard to tell, although the rhetorical tropes that have accompanied
this work seem to subscribe to the national imaginings on antiquity and to the
‘spiritual values of classical art and the austere hieratic character of the monument’
(as the preface to Calligas 2010b states), than to transnational concerns about
borders, wars and immigration.
The second photographic intervention is by the French photographer
and philosopher Jean-François Bonhomme. His Athenian work was first
published (in Athens, in a bilingual Greek and French edition) in 1996, but
the photographs had been taken several years earlier. This edition was given the
evocative and ambiguous title, Athens in the Shadow of the Acropolis (Athènes à
l’ombre de l’Acropole) and was accompanied by extensive commentary by Jacques
Derrida (Bonhomme and Derrida 1996). A French edition (2009) was entitled
Demeure, Athènes, an ambiguous title that was rendered in the English edition, a
year later, as Athens, Still Remains (Derrida 2010b). Here, antiquities intermingle
with antiques and bric-a-brac from the Monastiraki flea market, whereas
photographs taken at the meat and fish market or the now gone, historic Neon
coffee shop in Omonia Square a few hundred metres away, are reproduced side
by side with ancient funerary stelae and inscriptions. In a stunning photograph,
which is also reproduced on the cover of the original edition, two Caryatids
from the Erechtheion are portrayed tied up in ropes and on the move, this time
presumably from the monument to the now defunct, old Acropolis museum
(Fig. 6.1). The absence of human beings, the angle chosen which accentuates
the forward movement of the statues’ legs, and the tight, almost horizontal rope,
gives the impression of walking statues which are pulled by an invisible force,
evoking anthropomorphic narratives about the Caryatids, especially the stories
that refer to the ‘abduction’ of the ‘girl’ from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin (cf.
Hamilakis 2007: 70). On the other hand, on this image contemporary Athens
can be seen in the background, and at the feet of the statues, discarded tools,
seemingly linked to archaeological and conservation work, provide a context
to this photographic event. This work is rich in ambiguous photographic and
textual allusions, resisting any easy interpretation, and any co-option into
national or other narratives. ‘We owe ourselves to death’ is the opening line
in Derrida’s text, citing a photographic association which, as we saw above,
originates from the first years of the inception of photography. Indeed, there is
much here on ruination, memory, tactility, temporality, and death, and on the
photographic process as a whole, as the several images which depict cameras, as
well as the sleeping photographer on the Acropolis, testify. The tradition of the
photographic monumentalisation of the Acropolis looms large even on today’s

creative and artistic photographers, although some photographic production can
clearly afford and engender diverse and at times subversive readings.
The Other Acropolis project

Within this context and this long history of archaeo-photography with the
Acropolis at its centre, our own endeavour, The Other Acropolis project, which was
launched in 2008, has multiple aims and aspirations. The idea emerged out of both
critical work on the archaeological and photographic monumentalisation of the
site since the nineteenth century, and the frustration that such monumentalisation
is largely still being perpetuated and actively encouraged by institutions and official
discourses and practices, into the twenty-first century. One need only look at the
photographs included in the printed tourist guides available at the Acropolis, to
understand our discontent (for an exception, see Brouskari 2006). That frustration
is compounded by the observation that, judging by contemporary popular
photographic production as seen on internet file sharing sites such as Flickr,
for example, far too many photographs of the Acropolis follow the established
photographic canon. It is as if visitors feel the need, almost the impulse, to produce
their own iconic and stereotypical, postcard-like imagery, and exhibit it side by
side with the professional ones. Our original plan entailed the creation of an
alternative visitors guide to the site, a guide that would help visitors rediscover and
retrace overlooked or actively hidden materialities and temporalities, and enable
them to engage with the site in a multi-sensorial and kinaesthetic manner. That
guide is still ‘on the cards’, but in addition to the significant amount of work it
requires, it will also have to deal with the centralised bureaucratic archaeological
procedures that control the dissemination of all printed and other material on site,
including a vetting process of the content of such material. In the meantime, we
have started the production of a series of photographic objects, along with their
instant dissemination through a photo-blog (www.theotheracropolis.com). This is
the initial manifesto of the project, posted on the website:
This photoblog is the first stage of a series of projects by The Other Acropolis Collective. We
have a background in archaeology, anthropology or media studies, and we all share a desire to
intervene critically in the processes that often result in monolithic and exclusivist archaeological
and heritage materialities in the present. Our aim is to produce a range of alternative media
interventions which will take the iconic site of the Athenian Acropolis as their centre, their
point of departure or their target (in all senses of the word). This project is a follow-up from a
number of other, more conventional academic projects, to do with issues such as the role of the
Acropolis in nationalist and colonialist discourses and practices, the social, political, and sensual
lives of its ruins, the ways by which the transformative power of archaeological and photographic
apparatuses have produced and endlessly reproduced the site/sight of the Acropolis, the tourist
experience of the site and so on.
This project can be seen as the attempt to undermine the monolithic discourse on the Acropolis as
an exclusively classical site, by bringing into the fore its other lives, from prehistory to the present
(the Mycenaean, the Medieval, the Ottoman, the Muslim, the Christian, the contemporary…),
especially through their material traces that still survive, despite the extensive processes of
archaeological, but also photographic purification. We draw our inspiration from two concepts: the
first is multi-temporality, and the second, multi-sensoriality. We believe that the site and the space
around it constitute a unique locale which can re-activate different times, evoke different cultures,
and reconnect with diverse and fluid identities. At the same time, we hope to encourage a fully
embodied, multi-sensory appreciation and engagement with the materiality of the site, beyond the
stereotypical, tourist gaze, or the national pilgrimage. We also favour the re-incorporation of this
locale into the fabric of daily life, especially for the people who live around it. We hope that the
thoughts and the material generated here will lead to other projects and interventions, some on-
site, some printed, some virtual, with more immediate a printed, portable alternative tourist guide
for The Other Acropolis. We invite you to post your comment, share your thoughts and if you are an
artist or a researcher already working on a similar project, get in touch with us.
Most of the photographs on that site were produced by Fotis Ifantidis although
we have encouraged others to post their own material. They have been subjected
to minimal computer manipulation to enhance sharpness and contrast, and to
highlight features and themes that were essential for the purposes of the project.
In this intervention, we have actively attempted to disrupt the canonical
itinerary, partly dictated by the route designated by the authorities, and partly
by the mnemonic recollection and mimetic citation of an almost 200-year-old
pilgrimage: perhaps some panoramic shots from the Philopappos Hill opposite
(cf. Bohrer, this volume), and then up the Acropolis hill, through the Propylaea,
a quick look to the right for the Temple of Athena Nike, when not dismantled
or covered by scaffolding for yet another restoration and rebuilding, then either
straight to the Parthenon, or to the Parthenon via the Erechtheion, ending at the
Acropolis Museum, which, however, ceased to function as such in June 2007.7
7
The new Acropolis Museum below the Acropolis opened two years later, in June 2009,
and in 2010 it received 1.4 million visitors, compared to only 995,000 for the site (http://www.
artmediaagency.com/en/10004/the-new-acropolis-museum-receives-more-visitors-than-the-
acropolis-itself/ accessed 9 August 2013). The museum attracted more visitors than the archaeological
site itself, dethroning the Acropolis from its position as the most popular archaeological attraction in
Greece. The same has happened in the period between January and March 2013, that is before the start
of the foreign tourist season: 187,000 people visited the museum, and only 137,000 the site. (http://
www.statistics.gr/portal/page/portal/ESYE/BUCKET/A1802/PressReleases/A1802_SCI21_DT_
MM_03_2013_01_F_EN.pdf; accessed 8 August 2013). The new museum was conceived from the
start as an intervention within the aesthetics and politics of vision (cf. Hamilakis 2011), hence the
insistence that it should allow for a direct visual contact with the monument itself. Ironically enough,
however, in the first couple of years of the operation of the museum, photographing by visitors was
prohibited. More recently, photographing has been allowed in the Parthenon gallery only, and in fact
the patio and that specific gallery of the museum have become the new canonical vantage points from
which to photograph the Acropolis.
Figure 6.2 Fotis Ifantidis, Remnants of Muslim tombstones on the Acropolis

Source: Fotis Ifantidis
In this itinerary, the stops to take photos, and the positions and angles chosen were
and are almost pre-determined. We wanted to asked visitors instead to stop at
some other interesting spots. For example, as they were walking up the hill through
the Propylaea, we wanted to draw attention to some broken marbles, fragmented
remnants which could be spotted if one were to leave that predetermined route,
and instead of continuing the ascent, go down some steps northwards, and to the
left as they were walking up.
Amongst the rubble, they would have noticed fragments of Muslim
headstones from graves (Fig. 6.2). These were most likely shaped from ancient
architectural pieces when, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
the area to the south-west of the Acropolis was a Muslim cemetery.8 To spot
these remnants and to recognise them as such is a rather difficult task for the
contemporary visitor, even one with prior knowledge and expertise on the site.
To venture into these parts of the site can also be risky, as they are not meant
to be fully accessible to the public. This photograph does not only foreground
and highlight these Muslim, Ottoman traces as worthy of attention, but also
projects the site as a continually living landscape, where practices of reworking
and reshaping the material past were central. At the same time, the photograph
frames these fragments within an unconventional background which includes
a Christian church, other nineteenth- or early twentieth-century buildings,
and the lush vegetation of the Athenian Agora, complete with exotic palm
trees. The associations here are not only with diverse, multi-religious and
multi-temporal pasts, but also with a non-typically European landscape.
8
For a visual testimony, see the 1790 drawings by Thomas Hope (1769–1831) (Tsigakou
1985).
Figure 6.3 Fotis Ifantidis, An ancient architectural fragment from the

Erechtheion with an 1805 Ottoman inscription (26-10-2007)
Finally, the horizontal prominence of the metal fence evokes an enclosed and
thus prohibited or at least inaccessible locale, whereas the multiplicity and the
fragmentary nature of the architectural debris contrasts sharply with the prominent
and extensive restoration and rebuilding projects that dominate the Acropolis,
embodiments of the desire to re-collect the fragments and reconstruct an idealised,
originary, singular and inevitably arbitrary whole.
As the visitors were to continue their tour, and after quickly seeing the
Erechtheion and before they set off for the Parthenon, we wanted to draw their
attention to another multi-temporal and multi-cultural piece (Fig. 6.3): an
ancient architectural fragment with an 1805 Ottoman inscription in Arabic script
(cf. Paton 1927: 7–72; and for a translation of the inscription, Kambouroglou
1889: 211). In the nineteenth century, this piece was embedded in one of the
gates of the Acropolis in the Propylaea; the inscription praises the Ottoman
governor of Athens and his efforts to fortify the Acropolis (cf. Hamilakis 2007).
Since we spotted this piece several years ago, we keep returning to it and have
photographed its progressive reburial under a pile of gravel. Its current fate is
unknown.
However, we also wanted to draw attention to the materiality and physicality
of the rock itself and evoke its tactile properties, as well as its constant
making and remaking and its intended and unintended transformation.
A photographic object such as the one shown in Figure 6.4, for example,
directs the gaze downwards, towards the rock surface itself. To be more precise,
Figure 6.4 Fotis Ifantidis, Slippery surfaces

this photograph was not produced out of a deliberate attempt to photograph

the rock surface. It was rather the rock itself or, better, the slippery effects of
its polished surface which forces you to move slowly and very carefully that
demanded and captured our attention. Furthermore, this embodied reaction
encouraged us to reflect not only on the physicality and the geology of the
Acropolis before (and despite of ) any cultural alteration, but also on the
archaeological processes of extensive clearing that started in the 1830s, and
which stripped from the rock most, if not all, its soil, and with it, all or almost
all its post-classical material. Since then, exposed to the feet of millions of
visitors, the rock has become polished, shiny and slippery, so preserving the
memory of countless tourist and other pilgrimages. These slippery surfaces
invite us to write a history of the Acropolis ‘through the feet’, to evoke the
memorable phrase by Tim Ingold (2004).
As noted earlier, the foregrounding of the multi-temporality of the site became
a central concern of our efforts, not an easy task, given the extensive campaigns
by official archaeology to erase all non-classical archaeological traces and produce
the contemporary landscape of oblivion. Alongside multi-temporality we also
wanted to draw attention to the ongoing archaeological processes of inscription
and transformation (Fig. 6.5), but also to the role of the Acropolis as a site of
memorialisation, a process that started in antiquity and continues up to the present:
from the commemoration of the Philhellenes, to that of the thirteenth-century
Catalans and Aragonese who are commemorated by a plaque installed in 2011, and
to the removal of the swastika by Manolis Glezos and Lakis Santas in 1941, an event
that has been seen as marking the beginning of resistance against the Nazi occupiers.
We also consider the area around the Acropolis as part of the same monumental
landscape, and we wanted to trace presences and absences on it, and at the same
time foreground this landscape as a site of on-going contestation about aesthetics
and politics, past and present (Fig. 6.6): this photograph, from the north slope of the
Acropolis, draws attention to an unassuming and humble cement plinth, erected in
front of what seems to be a void: an open, earthly rectangular space, occasionally
a dumping ground, with a few rather anaemic plants struggling to establish a
presence. Someone who looks closely will notice some inconspicuous architectural
remnants, unearthed by archaeologists in 2004, and attributed to a small mosque
that stood here, dating from the time of Ottoman Athens. The sign reads: ‘Küçuk
Cami, Κιουτσούκ Τζαμί’, in Turkish and Greek, meaning ‘The Small Mosque’.
At the time when this photograph was taken (2 June 2007), an attempt had been
made to cross out the Greek word for mosque, whereas underneath the Turkish
inscription, the phrase ‘Temple of Aphrodite’ had been written (in Greek) with
chalk. A closer reading, however, would reveal yet another much smaller graffito, in
Turkish, next to the Turkish word for mosque: ‘evet doğru!’, ‘Of course!’ One needs
to be reminded here that, for at least the last decade or so, one of the issues that
occupies public debate in Athens is the lack of a legally recognised, functioning
mosque for the ever increasing number of the city’s Muslim inhabitants. Drawing
attention, through our photography, to this inconspicuous sign, is a reminder that
the monumental, highly contested landscape of the Acropolis continuous to be
central to many on-going debates and contestations in the broader public sphere.
The same contestation also takes us inside the new museo-scape of oblivion, the
Acropolis Museum, which attempts to direct the gaze towards the ‘Sacred Rock’,
Figure 6.5 Fotis Ifantidis, The Acropolis as a site of inscription and

commemoration
Figure 6.6 Fotis Ifantidis, A small mosque resurfaces at the foothill of the
Acropolis (2-6-2007)
hiding the perceived ugly modern blocks with screens and panels (Fig. 6.7). Here, the
solitary, isolated statues positioned against the stark whiteness of the screen, contrasts
sharply with the grey of the modern building blocks outside, their balconies decorated
with air-conditioning units and redundant and abandoned furniture. The museum
here is projected as an austere and pure heterotopia that looks up to the ‘Sacred Rock’,
inviting its visitors to gaze at their ‘future anterior’ (cf. Preziosi 2003: 40).
Unlike other interventions, such as the ones discussed above, the key members
of this project are archaeologists with an interest in the aesthetics and politics
of photography and its material, temporal, and mnemonic dimensions. As such,
the venture attends to both the photographic and the archaeological, treating
each domain with due sensitivity, and attempts to foreground and engender
the combined mnemonic and temporal possibilities of both apparatuses. More
specifically, the depiction of multi-temporal archaeological fragments is further
enhanced by the multi-temporal affordances of the photographs themselves.
Furthermore, the materiality of the archaeological artefacts and monuments and
their sensorial and mnemonic attributes are further accentuated by the evocation
of movement, tactility and embodied experience by the specific photographs. These
photographs are not representations of the archaeological past, but evocations of
its materiality, its sensorial dimension and its multi-temporal character.
One could object that these are digital photographs and hence do not share
the materiality and the sensorial affordances of analogue photographs. This thesis
is reminiscent of the on-going debate in photographic theory on the consequences
of digital technology (cf. Batchen 1997: 206–16; Ritchin 2009; papers in Wells
2003, esp. Lister) but it rests on shaky philosophical and empirical ground.
For a start, photography is not exclusively about the final product; it is instead a
‘photographic event’ (Azoulay 2008, 2012) or rather a photographic process which
Figure 6.7 Fotis Ifantidis, At the new Acropolis Museum (25-10-2009)

involves spaces and places, various social actors, as well as a technological apparatus.
It often entails moving, multi-sensorially active bodies, engaging in various
negotiations, positioning and re-positioning themselves vis-à-vis other bodies,
things and artefacts, the light, the ambience, the weather, the soundscape and the
surrounding mediascapes. Materiality, memory, and the senses are all crucial factors
in these photographic events, irrespective of the specific technology used, and we
have tried to bring them into the fore in the disseminated photographs. Even the
process of engaging with the produced digital photographs is mediated through

materiality, be it that of the camera, the computer or smartphone screen, or paper,
as many people prefer to print out digital photographs rather than experience
them only through hardware media. Furthermore, in our case, in addition to the
interactive photoblog, we have disseminated the photographs through photo-
essays in books (e.g. Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2013), as well as other publications
such as this one.
Besides, as we intimated earlier in this chapter, the digital process and the
associated ease of retouching and computer manipulation of photographs, rather
than signalling the death of the medium as some had predicted (e.g. Mitchell
1992) have resulted in its further flourishing and omnipresence,9 and have
allowed us to foreground the situated and creative role of the photographer
in any photographic venture. In his Pencil of Nature, Fox Talbot had felt it
necessary to insert notes amongst his photographs declaring that ‘[t]he plates
of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid
whatever from the artist’s pencil’ (Fox Talbot 1844), but in fact we know that the
manipulation of photographs predates digital technology, and was present from
the very beginning of the photographic medium (Fineman 2012). In The Other
Acropolis project, rather than assuming any pretence of distance and ‘objectivity’,
we have instead positioned our efforts within the contemporary social, aesthetic
and political landscape, and have made it clear that our photographic endeavour
aims at the photographic and archaeological de-monumentalisation of the
site. Digital technology makes it also much easier for others to participate in
the project by contributing their own photographs, and facilitates the wide
dissemination of photographs in the public arena.
Conclusion: from consensus to dissensus
Jacques Rancière (2006) notes that aesthetics and politics share the same ontological
ground; they are both about the distribution of the sensible, that is what is allowed
to be seen and sensed and what is not. If that is the case, then The Other Acropolis
is a political-cum-aesthetic project, a photographic-cum-archaeological activism.
9
As such, digital photographic technology can be now co-opted much more easily by state
and other apparatuses for surveillance and suppression, as well as by opposing forces in their efforts to
engender resistance and social change.
Barthes notes in his Camera Lucida that photographs can ‘block memory’ (1981:
91), and indeed oblivion is what both the photographic and the archaeological
monumentalisation of the site has produced since the nineteenth century. Or to be
more precise, both the photographic and the archaeological monumentalisation of
the Acropolis have produced forgetting and remembering at the same time: they have
contributed to the forgetting of the diverse lives of the site and its multi-temporal
character, and they have instead evoked and helped disseminate a national-cum-
colonial memory of a mono-chronic, sacred locale, a static, hieratic and auratic sight,
to be experienced with reverence and from a distance. The Other Acropolis project
generates a different, counter-modern political and aesthetic mnemonic production
which foregrounds and invites both multi-sensoriality and multi-temporality. Such
production requires a kinaesthetic and haptic visuality, as opposed to the dominant
regime of autonomous vision. Its photographic artefacts work by evocation rather
than representation; they engender presence and invite public reaction. The project,
in other words, encourages a dissensual, rather than consensual aesthetic experience
(cf. Rancière 2006). In a rapidly changing Athens, in a multi-cultural city like any
other modern western capital, where its recent, often Muslim immigrants are subject
to discrimination and xenophobic attacks, and where they still do not have their own,
officially recognised place of worship and cemetery, to produce such a dissensual
experience, to evoke the multiple histories of the sacred icon of western imagination,
including its Muslim and Ottoman material past, acquires both immense relevance
and extreme urgency. Finally, we hope to have shown that photography, both the
process itself and its photographic production, holds enormous potential for
archaeology, well beyond the documentary and museo-graphic uses to which they
are most commonly put. Their shared, creative ground of memory and materiality
can form the basis for a mutually transformative collaboration.
References
Arago, F. (1889), ‘Report on the Daguerreotype – Speech to the Chamber of

Deputies’, translated by J.S. Memes, American Journal of Photography 10: 238–
48 (first published 1839).
Azoulay, A. (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books.
Azoulay, A. (2012), Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, translated
by L. Bethlehem, London: Verso.
Baird, J.A. (2011), ‘Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928–37: An Archaeology of
the Archive’, American Journal of Archaeology 115: 227–46.
Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by
R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang (first published in French 1980).
Batchen, G. (1997), Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Batchen, G. (2004), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, New York: Van
Gogh Museum and Princeton Architectural Press.
Bateman, J. (2005), ‘Wearing Juninho’s Shirt: Record and Negotiation in

Excavation Photographs’, in S. Smiles and S. Moser (eds), Envisioning the Past:
Archaeology and the Image, Oxford: Blackwell 192–203.
Bazin, A. (1960), ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, translated by H.
Gray, Film Quarterly 13(4): 4–9.
Benjamin, W. (2008), The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press (first published 1935–36).

Bennett, T. (1995), The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London:
Routledge.
Berger, J. and J. Mohr (1982), Another Way of Telling, London: Writers and
Readers.
Bergson, H. (1991), Matter and Memory, New York: Zone Books.
Bohrer, F. (2011), Photography and Archaeology, London: Reaktion.
Bonhomme, J.-F. and J. Derrida (1996), Αθήνα. Στη Σκιά της Ακρόπολης. Athènes.
À L’Ombre de L’Acropole, Greek translation by V. Bitsoris, Athens: Olkos.
Brouskari, M. (2006), The Monuments of the Acropolis, Athens: Ministry of Culture,
Archaeological Receipts Fund (3rd edition).
Buck-Morss, S. (1992), ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork
Essay Reconsidered’, October 62: 3–41.
Cadava, E. (1997), Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Princeton:
Calligas, L. (2010a), ‘At the Old Museum’, in L. Calligas, Metoikesis, Athens and
Thessaloniki: Benaki Museum, Contemporary Art Centre for Thessaloniki,
and Cube Art Editions.
Calligas, L. (2010b), Metoikesis, Athens and Thessaloniki: Benaki Museum,
Contemporary Art Centre for Thessaloniki, and Cube Art Editions.
Crary, J. (1992), Techniques of the Observer: Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Derrida, J. (2010a), Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, edited
by G. Richter, translated by J. Fort, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2010b), Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme,
translated by P.-A. Brault and M. Naas, New York: Fordham University Press.
Downing, E. (2006), After Images: Photography, Archaeology, and Psychoanalysis and
the Tradition of Bildung, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Oxford: Berg.
Edwards, E. (2009), ‘Thinking Photography beyond the Visual?’ in J.J. Long,
A. Noble and E. Welch (eds), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, London:
Routledge, 31–48.
Edwards, E. and J. Hart (2004), ‘Introduction: Photographs as Objects’, in
E. Edwards and J. Hart (eds), Photographs, Objects, Histories, London: Routledge,
1–15.
Fabian, J. (1983), Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Fineman, M. (2012), Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fox Talbot, H. (1844), The Pencil of Nature, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and
Longmans.
Freud, S. (1932–36), ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’, in J. Strachey
(ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

vol. 22, London: Hogarth Press, 239–48.
Guha, S. (2010), The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology, New Delhi: The
Alkazi Collection of Photography with association with Mapin Publishing.
Hamilakis, Y. (1999), ‘La Trahison des Archéologues? Archaeological Practice as
Intellectual Activity in Postmodernity’, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology
12(1): 60–79.
Hamilakis, Y. (2001), ‘Monumental Visions: Bonfils, Classical Antiquity, and
Nineteenth-century Athenian Society’, History of Photography 25(1): 5–12, 23–43.
Hamilakis, Y. (2008), ‘Monumentalising Place: Archaeologists, Photographers,
and the Athenian Acropolis from the Eighteenth Century to the Present’,
in P. Rainbird (ed.), Monuments in the Landscape: Papers in Honour of Andrew
Fleming, Stroud: Tempus, 190–98.
Hamilakis, Y. (2009a), ‘Trasformare in Monumento: Archeologi, Fotografi e
Metamorfosi delle Rovine e Identita Culturale, Torino: B. Borringhieri, 179–94.
Hamilakis, Y. (2009b), ‘Μνημειοποίηση του τόπου: αρχαιολόγοι, φωτογράφοι, και
η Αθηναϊκή Ακρόπολη από το 18ο αιώνα μέχρι σήμερα’, in M. Spyridakis (ed.),
Μετασχηματισμοί του χώρου, Athens: Nisos, 373–96.
Hamilakis, Y. (2011), ‘Museums of Oblivion’, Antiquity 85: 625–9.
Hamilakis, Y. (2013), Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and
Affect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hamilakis, Y. and J. Labanyi (2008), ‘Introduction: Time, Materiality and the
Work of Memory’, History and Memory 20(2): 5–17.
(a photo-essay)’, Public Archaeology 8(2–3): 283–309.
Hamilakis, Y. and F. Ifantidis (2013), ‘The Other Acropolises: Multi-temporality
and the Persistence of the Past’, in P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison and
A. Piccini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary
World, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hauser, K. (2007), Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape
1927–1955, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,
translated by W. Lovitt, NewYork: Harper Torchbooks.
Herzfeld, M. (2002), ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-colonialism’,

South Atlantic Quarterly 101: 899–926.
Ifantidis, F. (2013), Archaeographies: Excavating Neolithic Dispilio, Oxford:
Archaeopress.
Ingold, T. (2004), ‘Culture on the Ground: the World Perceived through the Feet’,
Journal of Material Culture 9(3): 315–40.
Kambouroglou, D. (1889), Μνημεία της ιστορίας των Αθηνών, vol. I, Athens:
A. Papageorgiou.
Levitt, T. (2009), The Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in
France, 1789–1848, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lydon, J. (2005), Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Lyons, C., J.K. Papadopoulos, L.S. Stewart and A. Szegedy-Maszak (eds) (2005),
Archaeology and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, Los
MacDonald, C. 2010, ‘Metoikesis’ in L. Calligas, Metoikesis, Athens and
Thessaloniki: Benaki Museum, Contemporary Art Centre for Thessaloniki,
and Cube Art Editions, 14–21.
Mallouhou-Tufano, F. (1998), H αναστήλωση των αρχαίων μνημείων στη νεώτερη
Ελλάδα, 1834–1939, Athens: I en Athinais Arhaiologiki Etaireia (Vivliothiki
this Arhaiologikis Etaireias, 176).
Mitchell, W.J. (1992), The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-photographic
Era, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Newhall, B. (ed.) (1980), Photographs: Essays and Images. Illustrated Readings in the
History of Photography, London: Secker and Warburg.
Olin, M. (2012), Touching Photographs, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Paton, J.M. (ed.) (1927), The Erechtheum, Cambridge, MA and Princeton: Harvard
University Press and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
Pinney, C. (2001), ‘Piercing the Skin of the Idol’, in C. Pinney and N. Thomas
(eds), Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment, Oxford: Berg,
157–79.
Pinney, C. and N. Peterson (eds) (2003), Photography’s Other Histories. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Poole, D. (1997), Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Preziosi, D. (2003), Brain on the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of
Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, J. (2006), The Politics of Aesthetics, translated by G. Rockhill, London:
Continuum.
Ritchin, F. (2009), After Photography, New York: Norton.
Schaaf, L.J. (2000), The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, Princeton:
Sekula, A. (1981), ‘The Traffic in Photographs’, Art Journal 41(1): 15–25.
Shanks, M. (1997), ‘Photography and Archaeology’, in B.L. Molyneaux (ed.), The

Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, London: Routledge,
73–107.
Shanks, M. and R. McGuire (1996), ‘The Craft of Archaeology’, American
Antiquity 61(1): 75–88.
Athens’, History of Photography 25(1): 13–22 and 23–43.

London: Macmillan.
Taussig, M. (1993), Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New
York and London: Routledge.
Tsigakou, F.M. (1985), Thomas Hope (1769–1831): Εικόνες από την Ελλάδα του
18ου αιώνα, Athens: Benaki Museum, The British Council, Melissa Publishers.
Wells, L. (ed.) (2003), The Photography Reader, London: Routledge.
Wright, C. (2004), ‘Material and Memory: Photography in the Western Solomon
Islands’, Journal of Material Culture 9(1): 73–85.

7
Greece through the Stereoscope:

Constituting Spectatorship through
Texts and Images1
Kostas Ioannidis and Eleni Mouzakiti
Rufus B. Richardson’s Greece through the Stereoscope consists of a series of

stereographs of Greece, together with a companion volume with texts containing
historical information on the sites and instructions on how to use the device.
The stereoscope and the stereograph, their technological development, their
uses and meanings, their cultural histories and genealogies, although fascinating
issues, can hardly be characterised as central topics in the relevant scholarship.
What are the reasons for this omission? Is it perhaps that in our eyes, used to
much more convincing virtual environments – see the current craze for 3-D
cinema, TV, and so on – stereoscopic images look rather like ‘cheap tricks’,
perhaps too cheap for a serious scholar? We do not think so, since early
capitalist phantasmagoria has become very popular in academic scholarship in
recent years.2 A possible reason might be that the stereoscopic effect cannot be
reproduced on the printed page, and only with great difficulty can be digitised
and made accessible through a Powerpoint presentation, for example. In what
follows, we will discuss this omission, connecting it with a further question
concerning the stereoscope’s rather sudden demise, early in the twentienth
century.
The first stereoscope, invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1832, was a device
that permitted someone to view through mirrors a pair of superimposed pictures
as a three dimensional image. During the 1850s and the 1860s, that is during the
period of the great popularity of the medium and especially after the success of
1
The authors would like to thank A. Tsirgialou (Photographic Archive of the Benaki Museum,
Athens), the collector N. Politis and the anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this paper.
2
See, for example, academic journals such as Early Popular Visual Culture (EPVC). See also the
work of scholars such as Crary (1990, 1999), and Marien (2002).
159
the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851,3 new viewers (for example the inexpensive
Holmes stereoscope) and new stereoscopic cameras (a binocular camera with
two lenses, and a twin lens stereoscopic camera) were produced. Due to the large
number of images manufactured and distributed thanks to all these technical
developments, stereoscopic photography turned gradually into an industry.4
In the USA, ‘stereomania’ began in the 1860s. It was claimed that there was
a stereoscope in every parlour (Darrah 1977: 2). Around the turn of the century,
stereoscopic technology moved into state education. The widely held conviction
that the ‘stereograph tells no lie’, along with the medium’s capacity to function like
a ‘magic carpet’ and turn the viewer into a traveller, fuelled the further commercial
success of the medium and led to a technologically-centered conception of
American citizenship, framing the stereoscopic perspective as an especially
white, middle-class way of looking, as observed by Brenton J. Malin in a recent
paper (2007). In what follows, we will examine Malin’s account, insisting on the
need to theorise further the concept of stereoscopic space and emphasising the
image’s visual rhetoric. We will use images taken from the Greek series published
by Underwood & Underwood, which, together with Keystone View Company,
were the biggest firms in the stereo business. These images were used widely as a
means of public instruction by institutions in the USA. Of exceptional interest is
the written material that accompanies the stereographs, and especially that which
supports the so-called Underwood Travel System which gives detailed instructions
about the use of the stereo images. Given that stereoscopic technology was hailed
by many as the most radical of all the developments connected with photography,
and given that almost every new technology in the twentieth century aimed at
rendering the illusion of a three-dimensional space ever more realistic, how are
we to explain its quick decline after the first decade of the century? Furthermore,
is it possible to give a somewhat retrospective account of the recent 3-D mania
through the prism of nineteenth-century stereomania?
Malin (2007) emphasises the relationships among image, technology and
institutional discourse in order to challenge widely held opinions, especially on
the part of nineteenth-century writers who stressed photography’s potential as a
universal language. Focusing on the interaction between stereoscopic images and
their accompanying marketing material, he connects stereoscopic technology
with the industry’s efforts to frame a highly socially stratified way of looking.
The ideal white, middle-class spectator that the companies seek to establish is
an enlightened citizen in an era where ‘a rising number of immigrants tested
the boundaries of the nation’s democratic promise’ and where ‘racist tensions
mounted’ (Malin 2007: 407–8). Although Malin’s arguments will prove valid in
the case we are going to present, we wish to shift the focus towards the visual
3
For a recent, theoretically informed view on this emblematic exhibition, see Preziosi 2003:
92–115.
4
For a recent discussion on the cultural history of stereoscopic technology see Marien 2002:
81–4 and Rosenblum 1997: 34–5.
Greece through the stereoscope 161
rhetoric that the stereoscopic image articulates. The reason for this is that we
want to insist on the stereoscopic medium’s specificity, something that, in our
opinion, Malin underemphasises. Our point is that Malin in the final analysis
fails to address convincingly the question of what is so special in stereoscopic
technology that renders it of major importance for the uses (especially the
educational ones) that its advocates proposed.
At this point, it is necessary to put forward a description of what it is exactly
that one sees through the stereoscope, given that, in what follows, we will base our
account on the effort to avoid any easy comparison of the stereoscope with other
similar technologies. It is particularly crucial to delineate the characteristics of that
space, the stereoscopic space, which appeared so fascinating in almost everyone’s
eyes. In contrast to most nineteenth-century accounts which stress the solidity of
the objects represented in our eyes, this space and the humans or the objects that
inhabit it look today far from realistic, compared at least with technologically more
advanced developments. They look more like flat, cutout forms. Let us borrow
Jonathan Crary’s description (1990: 125):
[…] in such images the depth is essentially different from anything in painting or photography.
We are given an insistent sense of ‘ in front of ’ and ‘ in back of ’ that seems to organise the
image as a sequence of receding planes. And in fact the fundamental organisation of the
stereoscopic image is planar. We perceive individual elements as flat, cutout forms arrayed
either nearer or further from us. But the experience of space between these objects (planes) is
not one of gradual and predictable recession; rather there is a vertiginous uncertainty about
the distance separating forms. Compared to the strange insubstantiality of objects and figures
located in the middle ground, the absolutely airless space surrounding them has a disturbing
palpability.
Almost two decades after its first appearance, Crary’s Techniques of the Observer
remains one of the few books that offer a theoretically informed reading of
stereoscopic technology. But despite Crary’s description of it as ‘an absolutely
airless space’, a perception we might possibly share – especially if we choose his
phenomenologically driven apparatus – all the older accounts seem to agree on
the power of illusion that the stereoscope offers the spectator. It is the illusion
of losing oneself in the almost truly three-dimensional stereoscopic space and
travelling, or communicating with people that share this space. And it seems
that it was exactly this illusion that made the stereo image appealing. In an
Underwood & Underwood publication with stereographs of Rome we read:
‘The prime quality that puts the stereograph in a class by itself is its depth or
perspective. All other pictures suggest depth, but the stereoscope has the far
and near of the real landscape’ (Ellison 1902: xiii). According to this line of
thought, stereoscopic technology does not suggest space; it embodies real space,
which means that it has nothing to do with any kind of representation. Being
a slice of the real world and not an artificial rendering of a version of it gives
the stereoscopic image an unparalleled status. In the above lines, stereoscopic
space is read like a physical space; that is, its possible rhetorical force is rendered
invisible or transparent, it is not recognised as such.5
Around the turn of the century, Underwood & Underwood, later bought by
Keystone, developed the Underwood Travel System, mentioned above. It was
a complex apparatus of stereoscopic photos, accompanied by a book and maps
designed to render depth even most plausible. For the photos a special case was
designed to resemble a book while the similarly bound companion volume had
a case specially designed for the maps. The book about Greece, Greece through
the Stereoscope (Richardson 1907) was written by the archaeologist Rufus
Richardson, who served as the director of the American School of Classical
Studies at Athens for ten years. In his introduction to the volume, Richardson
expresses his great enthusiasm for the Underwood Travel System (1907: 10):
It can easily be understood therefore with what deep interest I became acquainted with
the Underwood Travel System, a means by which it appeared that the privilege for which
I longed – the privilege of knowing what it meant to stand in the great places in Greece –
could be made possible to the millions, to poor students in thousands of schools, to busy
professionals and business men, to people shut away from the world in the most remote
districts.
A few lines after this eulogy for the democratisation of knowledge, a very
common argument by the stereoscope’s advocates and a point on which Malin’s
analysis particularly draws (2007: 413), Richardson insists on the fundamental
difference between a common photo and a stereo view:
First of all, we get perfect or actual space for our minds as contrasted with the appearance
of space in ordinary photographs. Objects stand out in all three dimensions, or as solids,
as in nature. Second, we see objects and places life-size, that is in natural size and in
natural distance. The two small photographic prints, a few inches from the eyes, serve as
two windows through which we look. Third, while looking at these stereographed scenes in
all three dimensions, life-size and of almost infinite accuracy in detail, it is possible to lose
consciousness of one’s immediate bodily surroundings and to gain, for appreciable lengths of
time, a distinct consciousness or experience of being in the presence of the place or object
itself (Richardson 1907: 11).
Rather than Crary’s ‘flat, cutout forms’, Richardson writes about solid, natural
objects. The stereoscopic ‘actual space’ is contrasted to the ‘appearance’ of it,
in ‘ordinary photographs’. He also hints at the revolutionary character of the
stereoscope by using the familiar Renaissance window metaphor. But here we
need two windows to make a picture. Technology acquires an anthropomorphic
appearance in order to become the best prosthesis available to our physical
vision. It is in his third point, however, that something much more important is
5
On the suppression of rhetoric already in the nineteenth century, see White 1997.
to be found. This is the idea of an almost total immersion in another world, an

idea that offered the basis for a stereotypical motif in the field of stereoscopic
imagery. This immersion is connected with a loss of consciousness of ‘immediate
bodily surroundings’ that leads to an experience of ‘being in the presence of the
place or object itself ’. According to this view, space is the most crucial parameter
for the subject’s consciousness. The stereoscopic device provides the opportunity
for the spectator to travel far away while sitting comfortably at home. Time is
used by Richardson only to refer to the duration of the new experience. That is
because in the stereographed world, time is closely related to historical space.
A new positioning of the subject in space causes an automatic shift in that
person’s time settings. The only thing that counts thus is the ‘appreciable length’
of the experience gained. Searching for the visual documentation of these ideas,
already in the 1850s we see stereoscopic photos of ‘stereomaniacs’ with their
eyes on the machine, totally immersed, not even realising that other men were
courting their companions behind their back (Marien 2002: 82).
Nevertheless, the distance between these early formulations and Richardson’s
enthusiastic idea of the possibility of losing consciousness and being ‘in the
presence of the place or object itself ’ remains rather long. We should therefore
follow his line of thought more closely. Later in the same text, acknowledging
the limitations of the medium, that is the real traveller’s movement or lack of
perception through the other senses, he goes on to defend the primacy of the
sense of sight and present his central argument:
At any rate we should see that, though there is a difference in the quantity and intensity
there need be no difference in the kind of feelings experienced. We may experience the
very same kind of feelings and emotions that we would experience in Greece. And the
fact that one can come back to these scenes in the stereographs again and again makes
it undoubtedly possible to approximate much nearer than we think to the full emotional
experience of the traveler.
I shall not pretend to speak of the possibilities that are here opened up in the fields of
education and general culture. Direct access to Greece can be given in this way from every
classroom, student’s room, and from homes generally. […] With the powerful stimulus thus
given to the historical imagination of the student […] the misty characters of history will take
on flesh and blood like never before (Richardson 1907: 15).
In these last lines, Richardson draws on another common theme in late nineteenth-
century historical thought, namely the important role of the regime of vision in
stimulating historical imagination.6 It is exactly here that the revolutionary force of
stereoscopic technology lies. It gives direct access to Greece and the Greek people,
according to Richardson, ‘the most gifted race the world has known’ (1907: 15).
6
On the concept of historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, the locus classicus is
White 1973.
The experience is in qualitative terms no different than that gained by one’s actual
presence in Greece. The fact that you can come back to the same space again
and again strengthens the emotional experience provided by the stereoscopic
travel simulator. The stereoscope’s advocates had implied that the subject is not a
disembodied optical automaton that moves from one historic place to the other by
a simple change to its settings. It is rather a subject that experiences feelings and
emotions. And once more, space is the crucial parameter for this. But how exactly
is this almost fully embodied access to new worlds achieved? By following simple
instructions. We read for example: ‘The less you are conscious of things close about
you, the more strong will be your feeling of actual presence in the scenes you are
studying’ (Richardson 1907: 18). This is a call to put reality, here connected with
the subject’s consciousness and with the objects surrounding her, into brackets.
Further instructions include these:
Think definitely, while you have your face in the hood, just where your position is, as learned
from the maps and explanatory text. Recall your surroundings in mind […]. You will find
yourself richly repaid for the effort by your fuller sense of presence in Greece (Richardson
1907: 18).
Having at last gained access to the privileged land of Greece, what exactly are we
going to see? And what will the repertoire be, to use Richard Wollheim’s (1987:
104–85) well-known term, that we carry in our luggage in order to travel? To
answer, we chose an almost typical example of the views provided by the series.
Viewing position 60 is ‘Sparta on a market day’ (Fig. 7.1). And here one reads:
Evidently this is a market day or a holiday, of which the Greek year has a liberal allowance.
There is also the ever-present paidhi (garçon) with a glass of red wine in his hand, and the
soldier with his brass buttons. In front of the paidhi is the most picturesque figure of the
group, an old shepherd with gray hair and bronzed face, wearing winter garments. He has
come down from the slopes of Taygetos where it is cool, to part with one or more members of
his flock. He is unkempt and probably stupid. He does not know that he is picturesque and
cares little whether he is or not. He knows ‘that the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn;
that good pastures make fat sheep’. But you can trust him to take good care of you, if snow or
rain overtake you high up on the slopes of Taygetos (Richardson 1907: 211–12).
Richardson describes the persons that fill the stereoscopic space as if analysing
motifs on a canvas. The ever-present ‘paidhi’ is such a motif. The shepherd, the
‘most picturesque figure of the group’, is the most obvious case of a person
aestheticised and objectified. This man does not care about aesthetics; he just
knows about his sheep. He is a personification of nature, and thus an object
of aesthetic contemplation by us humans having the capacity of disinterested
thought. There are numerous cases where we are confronted with the same
rhetoric. For example, in another stereo image of the interior of a house in
Messene (Fig. 7.2), we read:
Figure 7.1 Unknown photographer, Market day at Sparta, Peloponnese,

c. 1897–1907
Source: Underwood & Underwood © Benaki Museum Photographic Archive
Figure 7.2 Unknown photographer, Messene, Peloponnese: ‘Picturesque

interior of a modern Greek villager’s home, Messene, Greece’,
c. 1897–1907
Source: Underwood & Underwood © Benaki Museum Photographic Archive
The man before us, ‘a good Messenian’ knows nothing of what we call good manners; he would
make a poor figure in the drawing room. But he will give you of the best that he has if night
overtake you and you call here at his door (Richardson 1907: 227).
A civilised savage, a creature of nature, is implied here again. Together with

the Taygetos shepherd, these are men not suitable for the drawing room but
surely men you can trust. Being nature themselves they can help you, the civilised
American tourist, to overcome the dangerous natural elements (snow, night, and
so on) when needed.
An obvious juxtaposition can be easily observed here. While ancient Greece
with its architectural monuments and its glorious inhabitants is described
as a source for untold pleasure and instruction, the modern inhabitants of the
country, when confronted, are usually described as far from civilised, as nature
and as objects for aesthetic contemplation at best. This evokes Timothy Mitchell’s
observed contradiction ‘between the need to separate oneself from the world and
render it up as an object of representation, and the desire to lose oneself within this
object-world and experience it directly’ (2009: 422). Or as Malin observes, these
seemingly contradictory messages, when taken together, ultimately strengthen the
white, middle-class self-consciousness that these stereoscopic discourses sought
to develop. The historical beauty of these countries ‘contributed to a kind of world
citizenship, which stereoscopic companies suggested was important to an educated
American public’, while ‘the people of these countries served as foils against which
their new high-tech American citizenship was compared and celebrated’ (Malin
2007: 414). In this context, Greece had a special role to play. It was crucial for
Americans to get in touch with the greatness of ‘the most gifted race the world has
known’, before them that is. On the one hand, Greece’s glorious past anticipated
their present. On the other hand, Greece’s pre-industrial present had been a
long-forgotten and very remote past for them – a past, though, that needed to be
mentioned in order to reinforce their belief in an even brighter future.
Still, an important issue remains open. Why did the stereoscope decline,
not long after Richardson’s enthusiasm about the possibilities it had opened
up in the fields of education and general culture? In 1859 Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s had proposed the creation of stereoscopic libraries where the whole
world could be stereographed and made accessible through the stereo viewer
(Holmes 1981: 53–61). Jonathan Crary argues that stereoscopic technology was
insufficiently phantasmagoric and required the physical engagement with the
apparatus, something which ‘became increasingly unacceptable’. He concludes
that photography defeated the stereoscope because ‘it recreated and perpetuated
the fiction that the “free” subject of the camera obscura was still viable’ (Crary
1990: 133–6).
We believe that this is only partly right. Especially in the light of 3-D
technology, Crary’s argument sounds rather weak. 3-D technology requires almost
the same kind of physical engagement as with the stereoscope, since in most
cases a similar prosthetic device which could expand the body’s physical limits
(through a computer screen or through special glasses, for example) is needed.

This, however, does not destroy the fiction of the free subject on which it is
crucially based. Moreover, Richardson’s enthusiasm about the loss of consciousness
of ‘one’s immediate bodily surroundings’ points to the fact that stereoscopic
technology’s advantage was considered to be exactly that: the strengthening of
the fiction of the free and almost fully embodied subject. Contrary to Crary’s
belief, it seems that like contemporary 3-D technology, stereoscopic technology
had been sufficiently ‘phantasmagoric’. It is, therefore, our opinion that the crucial
reason for the stereoscope’s eclipse has more to do with the issue of time than
with the insufficiently realistic rendering of space, as Crary again seems to imply.
Stereoscopic technology requires a considerable amount of time to be enjoyed. The
‘vertiginous uncertainty about the distance separating forms’ and the ‘disturbing
palpability’ (Crary 1990: 125) of the space surrounding them requires a rather
close and, for that reason, time-consuming attention on the part of the spectator,
in order for him/her to perceive the forms, their limits and the distance between
them. Due to this fact, the contemporary spectator, used to a cataclysmic flow of
images on a daily basis, gets a peculiar feeling of anxiety.
Looking at modernity retrospectively, and focusing on the era of high
modernism’s crisis during the 1960s, one is reminded that the issue of time, and
especially the timeless, strictly optical, mirage-like vision was much debated
between Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and the minimalist group (O’Brian
1993: 85-93; Fried 1998: 148–72). The era that was culminating during the
1960s showed, already in the first decades of the century, this tendency towards
an abstracted, timeless vision. The gradual elimination of time from the act of
viewing had been a crucial step toward that direction, and stereoscopic technology,
where the parameter of time, though not as prominent as that of space, was still
present, had been the first victim of this process. And here, we propose, lies the
crucial difference from the 3-D technology of our era. Apart from their similarities
implied above, 3-D images, in film especially, do not give the spectator any chance
to examine closely what lies between or behind them. The fact that this chance
was not denied by the stereoscopic image proved to be its weakest point. It gave
its spectator the access to scrutinise its scenic construction. But in the era of
modernism’s timeless vision no one considered this to be a privilege.
References
Crary, J. (1990), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crary, J. (1999), Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Darrah, W. (1977), The World of Stereographs, Gettysburg: Darrah.
Ellison, D.J. (1902), Rome through the Stereoscope: Journeys in and About the Eternal
City, New York and London: Underwood & Underwood.
Fried, M. (1998), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Holmes, O.W. (1981), ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, in B. Newhall (ed.),
Photography: Essays and Images, London: Secker and Warburg, 53–61.
Malin, B.J. (2007), ‘Looking White and Middle Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and
Technology in the Early Twentieth-century United States’, Quarterly Journal
of Speech 93(4): 403–24.
Marien, M.W. (2002), Photography. A Cultural History, London: Laurence King.

Mitchell, T. (2009), ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’, in D. Preziosi
(ed.), The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 409–23.
O’Brian, J. (ed.) (1993), Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism.
Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, vol. 4, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Preziosi, D. (2003), Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums and the Phantasms of
Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Richardson, R. (1907), Greece through the Stereoscope: A Tour Conducted by Rufus B.
Richardson, New York and London: Underwood & Underwood.
Rosenblum, N. (1997), A World History of Photography, New York: Abbeville.
White, H. (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century
Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
White, H. (1997), ‘The Suppression of Rhetoric in the Nineteenth Century’, in
B.D. Schildgren (ed.), The Rhetoric Canon, Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 21–32.
8
Archaeology of Refraction:
Temporality and Subject in
George Seferis’s Photographs
Theodoros Chiotis
‘There is a percentage of expression belonging to the material that is independent from

its maker; I am not certain whether I would call this a random occurrence. The maker of
worth is distinguished by the conjunction achieved between his own will and the will of
the material’
(Seferis 1975a: 73).
Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object’s loss –
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price –
The Object Absolute – is nought –
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far –
Emily Dickinson
(Dickinson 1960: 486–7)
Visual horizon1
Photography has often been considered the supplement to the written word. As
such, photography and literature have long had a symbiotic if somewhat uneasy
relationship. Michael Ignatieff in The Russian Album succinctly notes: ‘More often
than not photographs subvert the continuity that memory weaves out of experience
[…]. Memory heals the wounds of time. Photography documents the wounds’
1
The title of this part of the chapter comes from the diary entry dated 8 February 1926: ‘In the
same way that we have a visual horizon, we can imagine having an aural horizon, an olfactory horizon,
a horizon pertaining to corporeal pain, etc. Man is closed within these circles’ (Seferis 1975a: 42).
169
(Ignatieff 1987: 7). Ignatieff constructs a model of photography as an apparatus of

recollection and documentation. Recollection and documentation act as traces of the
historical wound, often altering one’s memories. Memory, or to be more precise the
memory of time lived, is subordinated to the ability of the medium, photography, to
cut a piece of time and preserve it for posterity. Photography (and, by implication,
the photographer’s subjectivity) creates a narrative supplement while simultaneously
modifying not only actual memories but also the very concept of memory.
Photography functions as a flattened archive – into which complex personal and

collective histories have been folded. The effect of memory on the construction of
subjectivity is the implied aspect in all of photography; photography arises from
a discourse indirectly acknowledging the variables affecting the photographer’s
subjectivity. Photography acts as the archive of the photographer’s response to the
world beyond the camera lens. The camera takes on the function of an investigative
agent searching for variations on the truth of the world. Photography in this way
becomes an event of perception itself, a mode of seeing (Sutton 2009: 108): the world
captured in the picture divulges a new way of seeing and thinking about the world
and a subtle rupture in the temporality of the world captured in the photograph
is effected. The subject observing the photograph repositions itself in relation with
the world: recollection and representation obviate the difference between perception
of reality and variations of that very perception of reality as it collapses onto the
flat surface of the picture. Photography preserves the moment when reality as the
variation of the present moment is captured onto the film of the camera.
In this chapter, I investigate how one of Greece’s foremost poets of the
twentieth century, George Seferis, uses photography to expose the internalised
progression of a subject becoming in time. In Seferis’s photographs, one can infer
a subjectivity employing photography as a tool auditing and underwriting that
which cannot be adequately captured in narrative, namely the passage of time.
Seferis’s photographs work both as a means of construing how time and memory
are folded in photography but also how photography allows the poet to interact
with the world in ways hitherto unexpected. Seferis’s photographs do not simply
capture the image of the past: they refract, rather than organise, time and memory.
Seferis as photographer frames his pictures by performing the ‘reverse archaeology’
he referred to in Meres, his personal diary: the poet’s photographs attempt to
assemble an alternate history of a personal experience of time; an experience of
time that is marked by a multitude of temporalities. In effect, Seferis’s photographs
excavate the history of one’s own experience of duration.
Although he was an enthusiastic photographer, Seferis never published a
book collecting his photographs.2 According to the testimony of his wife, Maro,
the poet approached and used photography as a memory-aid for his poetry
2
A selection of Seferis’s photographs has been published in an album issued by the Cultural
Foundation of the Greek National Bank (Seferis 2000), while a further selection of photographs has
been published in Kasdaglis 1990, Seferis 1999, Seferis 2005 and Seferis 2010. Of interest are also the
publications by Georgis 2004 and Papageorgiou-Venetas 2006.
Archaeology of refraction 171
rather than as an art in itself. His output, however, seems to suggest otherwise
(Papargyriou 2008: 82). The main themes of Seferis’s photography, as Papargyriou
notes, can be broken down into three categories: landscapes, ancient ruins and
urban architecture, with marked emphasis on dilapidated buildings and people.
The photographs that Seferis took throughout his life attempt to negotiate the
trauma of modernity (ibid.). Indeed, we could extend Papargyriou’s claim even
further by arguing that in his photography, Seferis documents the aftermath of
a modernist sublime. Seferis’s photographs register a shift in one’s perception

of mortality and existential stability. The viewer of Seferis’s photographs is
confronted with a sense of an excess of meaning and signification, a signature
trait of modernity.
Regardless of whether they are austere images of landscapes, buildings or
people, Seferis’s photographs foreground the consciousness of the photographer
as it comes in contact with the material. Sarah Kofman reminds us that Descartes
inferred that ‘there is no resemblance between object and image. It is the mind
that sees, not the eye, and the mind is consciousness without point of view’
(Kofman 1998: 52). The object effectively disappears onto the flat surface of the
image.
Seferis’s photographs pare away layers of the real in order to reveal how
photography might reflect perceptions back at the viewer. The experience of time
is further underlined by the refraction of time in Seferis’s photographic subject
matter. The images in Seferis’s photographic oeuvre reveal how the present’s
relationship with the past is conceived (Sutton 2009: 160).3 Bergson notes that
‘to perceive means to immobilize’ (1991: 275). Photography as a prosthetic tool
of memory immobilises perception and aids the recollection of the past even if
the moments recollected are characterised by fragmentation. Seferis himself had
noted: ‘Remembrance devoured my memory’ (1975a: 31). Seferis’s words imply
that recollection, that is to say, the ‘necessary poverty’ of representation, recreates
the world and subjectivity through an act of discernment (cf. Bergson 1991: 38).
The poet brings to the fore the mechanisms of memory and insinuates a rupture
in traditional chronology: the act of recollection, with its attendant multiplicity
and variation, has eroded the images stored in memory. Perception is thus re-
attached to the real. Bergson, in his seminal work Matter and Memory, had noted:
We become conscious of these mechanisms as they come into play; this consciousness of
a whole past of efforts stored up in the present is indeed also a memory, but a memory
profoundly different from the first, always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking
only to the future. It has retained from the past only the intelligently coordinated movements
which represent the accumulated efforts of the past; it recovers those past efforts, not in the
memory-images which recall them, but in the definite order and systematic character with
3
Deleuze notes that ‘we find ourselves in a movement … by which the “present” that endures
divides at each ‘instant’ into two different directions, one oriented and dilated towards the past, the
other contracted, contracting toward the future’ (1997: 38).
which the actual movements take place. In truth it no longer represents our past to us, it acts
it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but
because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment (Bergson 1991: 82).
Our perception of ourselves is created and preserved through the extension

of memory-images into the present. Expanding on Bergson, Lyn Hejinian notes
that ‘it is the task of art to preserve disappearance’ (2003: 80). Photographs create
a perception of oneself through recollection. The memorialisation of identity

occurs through the medium of photography: ‘the photograph presents the ‘I’
in the photograph as at once a flesh-and-blood subject and a dematerialised
phantom of an invisible photographer’ (Smith and Watson 2010: 175). In Seferis’s
photographs, perception coincides with the image of duration (Deleuze 1997:
52). Thus, photography for Seferis becomes an art of re-creative perception; the
art of recollecting the world in its absence:
Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we
become conscious of a sui generis act by which we detach ourselves from the present in order
to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past – a work
of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera (Bergson 1991: 133–4; cf. Laruelle
2012: 20).
So what could Seferis the poet have to do with photography if he is not

himself a professional photographer? If poetry for Seferis is a way of discovering
a personal voice to articulate his view of the world, then photography might
be seen as a way of reconceptualising the way he sees the world. Referring to
N. Scott Momaday’s autobiography with pictures, The Name, Paul Jay notes on
the effect of visual memory-aids on the imagination: ‘Memory begins to qualify
the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self ’
( Jay 1994: 204). Jay is referring to the formative (and, perhaps transformative)
effect photography might have on the photographer. If Flusser’s statement that
‘a photograph is an image of concepts’ (Flusser 2000: 36) is correct, then taking
photography seriously and diligently as Seferis did constitutes a new way of
conceiving the world. We might be able to argue that photography contributed
to Seferis’s poetic output as we might consider photography as an attempt at a
new kind of thinking (Laruelle 2011: 36).
Walter Benjamin tells us that ‘even the most perfect reproduction is lacking
one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place
where it is at the moment’ (Benjamin: 214); photography introduces to the
world the revelation of what is not there, or to be more precise, it introduces
the relation of what is not there with the subject. Photography is an ideography
(Laruelle 2011: 37), the simultaneous creation and documentation of new ideas
and new ways of thinking about the world. Photography enables Seferis to
cultivate intuition, ‘the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself
within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently
inexpressible’ (Bergson 1912: 7, original emphasis). Seferis had noted in a diary

entry dated Thursday July 15 1926:4
The greatest title a man can have is that of faber, artifex. The greatest grace of nature is letting
itself free. If nature frightens us or seems mysterious, it is because it mirrors the mystery and
awe of the body, of our organs, of those enemies of our thought and will. It is for this reason
that the human soul and nature are and have perpetually been forces in conflict hurting one
another using a thousand contrivances and brutalities (Seferis 1975a: 68–9).
The tension between the artificial and the natural is evident in this diary
entry, which documents the struggle for an unforced poetic voice. At the time
it was written, Seferis was waiting to take the entry exams for the diplomatic
service and was preoccupied with literary translation from French, while
reading prodigiously.5 It seems that this was a significant period for his poetic
development. The photographic practice of Seferis might be argued to have had a
formative (maybe even transformative) effect on the development of his thinking
and poetic sensibility.
‘… the obscurity of the box’:6 photography and/as the creative act
The ‘heterogeneous complex of codes upon which photography may draw’ (Burgin
2003: 131) might have initially intrigued the poet. The poet makes reference to
other media of mechanical reproduction in his oeuvre, such as gramophones. When
Seferis refers to mechanical reproduction of some aspect of human presence, his
assertion often seems to be accompanied by feelings of uneasiness and frustration.
In the poem ‘Tuesday’, the poet notes:
At every corner a gramophone shop

in every shop a hundred gramophones
for each gramophone a hundred records
on every record
someone living plays with someone dead.
Take the steel needle and separate them
if you can (Seferis 1995: 77).
4
Poems by Seferis in this chapter are quoted in Keeley and Sherrard’s translation (1995).
Extracts from the novel Six Nights on the Acropolis are quoted in Susan Matthias’s translation (2007).
All other excerpts from Greek texts, including Embirikos’s Octana, have been translated by the author.
5
Beaton 2003: 71. It should be noted that the first volume of Seferis’s personal diary, from
where this diary comes, was reworked on at least two or three later occasions and the originals destroyed
(ibid.: 66).
6
Flusser 2000: 26.
The work of mechanical reproduction is experienced only in an activity of

production (Barthes 1977: 157). The experience of listening to a recording or
looking at a photograph beyond a certain period of time intimates the command
of experiencing a certain moment captured in the recording or photograph or film
(Burgin: 136). The uneasiness accompanying the contemplation of the photograph
or the experience of listening to a recording arises not only from the consciousness
that the work of art is a place of work (Burgin 2003: 137) but also from the fact
that functions of the central nervous system are technologically implemented

(Kittler 1999: 28). Art enters an alliance with technology implicitly affecting one’s
understanding and experience of the world. In photography, the viewer finds him/
herself enmeshed in a web of signifying systems with which one must negotiate
(cf. Burgin 2003: 136–7). The subject behind the camera lens is produced in its
attempt to create sense out of what it views and experiences; in this way, the subject
might also regain some sense of its authority when capturing the world on film in a
specific way. In the poem ‘Narration’ Seferis describes the scene as follows:
That man walks along weeping

no one can say why
sometimes they think he’s weeping for lost loves
like those that torture us so much
on summer beaches with the gramophones (Seferis 1995: 127).
The scene of the gramophones as apparatuses of memory portrays a tableaux-

like image of a world within which everything invokes memory (cf. Burgin 2003:
133). Images, external stimuli and different times are superimposed on top of each
other: the world is perpetually created anew even if this proves to be an agonising
experience.7 The choice of how to frame the picture of the world beyond the camera
lens transforms the world into an identifiable object invested with meaning and
intensity. It can be argued that the photographer does not so much capture the world
but cribs a scene of the world-story he sees unfolding before his eyes. Seferis was
adamant that the poet must ultimately create things in his poetry not by describing
them but by naming them:
The ultimate goal of the poet is not to describe things but to create them by naming them. This, I
think, is his greatest joy. It is for this reason that the poet needs an increasingly precise adjustment
when approaching things, an identification. And this identification is always dependent on intensity,
never on length or linguistic density (Seferis 2003a: 139).8
7
Deleuze in his discussion of the function of memory in Alain Resnais’ film Je t’aime, Je t’aime
notes: ‘This is what happens when the image becomes time-image. The world has become memory,
brain, superimposition of ages and lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of
ages, creation or growth of ever new lobes, re-creation of matter’ (Deleuze 1989: 125).
8
Deleuze makes a similar points when talking about Thomas Hardy: ‘his characters are not
people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc
This statement is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, Seferis here
is uncoupling description, that is to say mimetic copying, from the practice
of poetry; and it seems he is quite a sceptic when it comes to the idea of
creating art through reproduction of any sort. Laruelle makes a similar point
when he notes that the photographer ‘“gives” to things – manifesting as it
is, without producing or transforming it – their real identity’ (2011: 56). The
creative act is dependent not so much on the mimetic function of art as it is
on the transformative process inherent in art. Art invents and transforms the
present moment.
Seferis’s words quoted as the first of this chapter’s epigraphs allude to the fact
that the work of art itself plays a significant role in whatever final form it takes. It
is through the creative process that the artwork takes a form hitherto unseen that
is not only unique but also the expression of the pursuit for producing new ways
of interacting with the world. Seferis thus seems to intimate the transformative
effect of the work of art on artist and world alike. The work of art and, in this
case, the photograph, are the communication of the experience and affect of an
image of thought (cf. Laruelle 2011: 119). The poet upon meeting Dylan Thomas
notes the following in his diary:
[Dylan] Thomas had been talking for some time. I don’t remember how; I asked him
whether there had ever been any occurrence when he described directly something he was
seeing, when he imitated the work of the painter who paints from sight – as I once tried in
my youth. – No, he said, I can’t do that; I need memory to collaborate with me. We even
agreed that it is not a good idea to have view in front of him when writing (Seferis 1986b:
36).
Seferis has already declared his unease about mechanical devices, such as the
gramophone. In this passage, Seferis is stating simultaneously his distrust of
faithful reproduction as an artistic practice while also intimating that some
sort of creative deformation is central to any artistic practice. In a way, Seferis
is restaging and making explicit Paul Valéry’s ambivalence evident in the 1939
speech on the centennial of the photograph. Valéry in that speech meditated
on the impact of photography on literature by noting the ‘new kind of reagent
whose effects have certainly not as yet been explored’ (quoted in Brunet:
80–82). Valéry concluded that there is an unmistakable parallel to be drawn
between the advent of photography and that of the ‘descriptive genre’; Valéry
thus inferred an epistemic link between the realist novel and the photographic
representation of reality (Brunet: 113–14).
Photography as a semi-automatic process demands of the practitioner, in
this case Seferis, to surrender control by placing a significant amount of trust
in the process and the material itself, more than he ever had done with the
written word: ‘… the photograph becomes the model for its receivers’ actions.
of variable sensations’ (Deleuze and Parnet: 39–40).

They react in a ritual fashion to its message in order to placate of fate circling
overhead above the surface of the image’ (Flusser 2000: 62).
The statement by Valéry quoted above, concerning the ‘new kind of reagent
whose effects have certainly not as yet been explored’, resonates even more in
this instance. Nevertheless, photography becomes a regular activity for Seferis,
though not one that he will expand on in his writings. In the whole of his poetic
oeuvre, there is only one reference to photography (in the poem ‘In the manner
of G.S.’). Mentions of photography are scarce in his diary as well.9 However, it

is interesting to note that when Seferis does refer to photography in his diaries,
it seems to be along the lines of outlining after a fashion an education of seeing
and by extension, a new way of thinking about the gaze. Photography, it seems,
serves as a tool for Seferis to explore and develop his poetic practice. It is
useful to note the observation Seferis makes in the diary entry dated Monday
November 22 1937, titled ‘Memory of Cavafy’. Here Seferis undertakes the
investigation of the Cavafy ‘type’ and in the process gives us an idea of the
impression Cavafy has made on him (Seferis 1977a: 85ff.) Seferis concludes
that it is useful to have ‘honest autobiographical information regarding our
own demeanour towards a work, but also of that work’s demeanour towards us’
(Seferis 1977a: 89). Seferis seems to be inferring that this honesty in how one
approaches and reacts to a work feeds into one’s own artistic practice. In the
same diary entry, the poet also notes that ‘… the school to learn to appreciate
works of art are other works of art and nothing else …’ (ibid.). This becomes
more evident as time goes by; a 1946 diary entry, written while Seferis was in
Poros, reads as follows:
The sun is rising. Last night’s moon still shining very brightly, high up in the sky towards
the west. The immobile mobility of these things is such that you think that the boat we
are traveling on, at any time, might be toppled over and might deposit you inside the
maelstrom, mixed with rocks, wood, colours, boats, much like when a passenger liner is
sinking. The need to tighten the aperture, otherwise you can feel yourself slowly fading away
(Seferis 1977b: 81).
One cannot help coming away with the feeling that Seferis was more than
an amateur photographer: his personal interest in photography was more
complex than that. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Seferis’s way of
observing and comprehending the world seems to have been gradually moulded
by photography. Eleni Papargyriou makes a similar case:
9
Papargyriou collects and collates in her article the explicit references to photography across
the seven published volumes of Μέρες. She locates the following references to photography in Seferis’
diary: Mέρες Α΄ (Seferis 1975a: 46), Μέρες B΄ (Seferis 1975b: 87), Mέρες Δ΄ (Seferis 1986a: 132–3, 171,
302), Mέρες Ε΄ (Seferis 1977b: 63), Μέρες ΣΤ΄ (Seferis 1986b: 36, 174).
Images seem to function as stimuli of thoughts, and to an even greater extent, words.
There is a linguistic interference when the onlooker describes a photograph; photographs
of people are obviously not the people they depict, but are conventionally recognised as
such. Arguably, it is the discourse around the image that establishes this recognition,
rather than an intuitive working of the mind itself. In other words, in order to make the
image meaningful, the onlooker envelops the content of the photograph with language
(Papargyriou 2008: 88).
In an earlier diary entry from 1943, Seferis had admitted that photography
sharpened his powers of observation: ‘I felt just like when the camera shutter
closes: the impression worked: why this particular one and not another one?’
(1986a: 302). In a way, Seferis is backtracking on a point he had previously
made himself: ‘… the painter creates for our sake, as they say, a new eye, the
musician creates for our sake new hearing, the poet creates a new (in the wider
sense of the word) perception’ (2003a: 155). The function of the work of art is
not representational but both experiential and experimental: the work seeks to
construct a real that is yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 142).
It is quite telling that in the 1946 diary entry previously quoted, the poet’s
description of the night sky and the luminescent moon evokes the camera
lens in a very specific manner: Seferis’s perception of the sky possesses a
necessarily fragmentary aspect: ‘the need to tighten the aperture’ extracts
these images from the flow of perception. The description of the night scene, a
particular way of seeing and perceiving the moon and the night sky, seems to
be commenting on the point when one’s conceptual powers reach an impasse.
Seferis in a letter written to Maro notes as much on the fragmentary nature
of the photographic gaze: ‘The smaller the aperture is, the more detailed
is the picture taken. When you say to yourself “that is wonderful”, “that is
lovely”, “that is brilliant”, you take pictures with a wide aperture, “flou”’
(Seferis 2000: 12). Seferis’s photographs can be seen as an intimation of the
workings of perception rather than simply as images of the world beyond the
camera lens.
These photographs are images excised from the flow of perception: an
increased control over the act of seeing is suggested. It becomes very much
apparent that photography functions for the poet as an enhancing prosthesis to
sight; in fact, we could go as far as to suggest that Seferis makes the call for an
intensified experience of the simple act of seeing. It is only in this manner that
photography stops simply being a medium for transmitting information about
the world and becomes a medium for transmitting intensity. Seferis makes a
similar point about language in poetry: ‘The work of the poet is to attempt to
master the language we give him and to make it speak in the highest possible
degree of intensity’ (Seferis 2003b: 173). It appears that if a poet happens
to be a great poet, then his work possesses ‘a part of the truth inherent in
other eras’ (Seferis 2003a: 130). Seferis implies that if one is an effective
artist, then one’s work can open doors to other eras and frames of perception:
‘[…] after our encounter with an unknown work we become different to who
we were before our encounter’ (Seferis 2003: 131). The encounter results in the
splitting of the image of the subject; this splitting of the image of the subject
emanates from the refraction of the image (cf. Sutton 2009: 159). Various
points of view are captured in the image as narration and narrative, as process
and product. This splitting of the image of the subject connotes a polychronic
temporality which effects a change in one’s perception often implied in
Seferis’s work. The resonating coexistence of different temporalities is often

encountered in Seferis’s poetry: in the section of the poem ‘Thrush’ entitled
‘Sensual Elpenor’, the poetic subject, upon coming across some remnants of
old clothes (one is tempted to see these tattered clothing as discarded images
of the self ), experiences this intrusion of different times in his present:
It’s as though
returning home from some foreign country you happen
to open
an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time
and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear
on happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights,
mirrored, now becoming dim,
and all that remains is the perfume of the absence
of a young form (Seferis 1995: 164).
In Seferis’s novel Six Nights on the Acropolis, as Stratis awaits Bilio to return,
the narrative seems to be flitting back and forth between times past and times
present. The narrative is mapping out how Stratis negotiates his desire for Bilio.
Desire, recollection and perception work to dissolve the rigid boundaries between
different times:
Stratis had now reached Omega, the final book of the Odyssey. It was getting dark. He
stepped outside the door to check the position of the Evening Star. Bilio was due back in
two or three hours at most. It was her expressed wish that he not meet her at the boat. The
sea was serene, just as it had been the previous Thursday. He recalled that spring day when
he waited for her in her house, that first time. He was surprised that his heart was beating
just as wildly now as it was then. The same images were straining to enter his consciousness.
He went back inside and began to arrange the room just as it had been the day she had left.
He walked over to the bed and rumpled the sheets. He laughed, catching himself trying to
give the sheets and pillows exactly the same shape her body had imprinted on them right
after she had gotten out of her bed. He walked towards the door again. He stopped short,
got a glass, filled it half full, and placed it right next to the bed. That’s how it was left after
she had taken a drink just before saying goodbye (Seferis 2007: 178).
Figure 8.1 George Seferis, Alona, Cyprus, 1954

Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image 152_1954
Stratis remembers back to the last time Bilio was there and attempts to
recreate the room according to the image in his head. He accesses his memory
in an attempt to bring the past into the present: motivated by desire, this
is an attempt on Stratis’s part to insert an image of the past in the present.
In this way, the willed, conscious staging of memory opens the past out into
the future. Stratis uses the image stored in his memory as an expression of
desire: the past is physically reconstructed in the present, thus becoming part
of it. A memory that had been archived as a seminal experience has become
tangible once again. Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever notes that the archive is
an ‘irreducible experience of the future’ (Derrida 1996: 68).
‘minute interstitial space’: photography and new perception
Seferis’s photographic output can be framed within a context of national

imagery: in the photograph taken in Cyprus in 1954 (Fig. 8.1), three children
are standing against a wall. The oldest one is joyfully looking at the camera
while being partially hidden by a cupboard; the other two are looking away
from the camera in a very unselfconscious manner. Above the heads of the
children, a message scrawled on the wall in capital letters reads ‘Greece is

what we desire even if that means eating stones’ and underneath it ‘Whose
is it?’ (we assume the question refers to Cyprus). The photograph seems to
make material and legible what the lay person of the time thought and desired.
The message on the wall can simultaneously be read as both a desperate call
for unity and integration but also as a questioning of personal and collective
identity. Seferis’s photographic output can also be situated within a context
of a modernity rendering perception automatic to a certain degree; in this
way, Seferis’s work attempts a punctilious and dexterous recreation of the
conditions of sensory perception. The photograph becomes the world as the
lens becomes a mechanical prosthesis for the eye. In this manner, the means
of perception undergo a silent, subtle revolution (Crary 2001: 13, 68). Seferis
as photographer obliquely captures the ‘sublimated precariousness’ of a
threatening modernising urban world as a means of formalising the effects of
personal and collective fragmentation and psychic upheaval; he achieves this
while simultaneously preserving a naturalist surface of the image, to paraphrase
Jonathan Crary (2001: 131).
Roland Barthes might have argued that
our entire civilisation has a taste for the reality effect, attested to by the development of
specific genres such as the realistic novel, the private diary, documentary literature, the news
item, the historical museum, the exhibition of ancient objects, and above all, the massive
development of photography, whose sole pertinent feature (in relation to drawing [and I am
going to add writing, as well]) is precisely to signify that the event represented has really
taken place (Barthes 1986: 139).
However, the photograph in Seferis’s case functions not just as a medium of

slavish representation but as an attempt to open an aperture into a different,
more precise (but not necessarily more faithful) perception of the world. Seferis
himself notes in a relevant passage in his diary for Saturday 18 December
1954: ‘We stopped just below Amshit and watched the sun sink inside the
calm sea of Phoenicia. But how it is that someone finally sees things clearly – I
mean like when the camera is properly set up’ (Seferis 1986b: 173–4). Seferis
had climbed up the Acropolis hill on two consecutive May nights in 1926 and
recorded his impressions:
Figure 8.2 George Seferis, Poros shipyard, 1940

Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image 4_1940_15
The line of Hymettus, the purest line I have ever seen; a permanent surprise that this is a line
of nature not belonging to art; the interstice here is minute. Erechtheion; the knees of these
girls who are neither women nor columns but rather cornerstones; strange, the weight they
lift you cannot feel it neither on their heads nor on their neck or their shoulders but on their
lifted leg and their chest (Seferis 1977a: 60, original emphasis).
Seferis’s photographic gaze describes in detail the Caryatids in an attempt

to retrieve and grasp duration; Seferis in his description attempts to grasp a
movement (the lifting of the leg) that has simultaneously already happened
and is happening as we speak. Seferis makes visible the infinite bisection of

time (Sutton 2009: 93), that is to say, he renders duration perceptible. In this
diary entry, Seferis creates a mental snapshot made up of concepts and states
of things (Flusser: 35–6). The image of boats ashore taken in Poros 1940 (Fig.
8.2), Venice 1952 (Seferis 2000: 89) and Ile-de-Rouad, Syria 1954 (Seferis
2000: 114) aspire to inscribe on the surface of photographic film the concept
and sensation of being cast ashore. For example, one might say that the Poros
photograph hints at a fragmentation: the anchor has been separated from the
body of the boat. The anchor seems to be the only thing left intact from the
entire structure. Taken over a period of 14 years, these three photographs are
anchored not only by their contingency but also by the fact that one makes
oneself the measure of photographic knowledge (Barthes 1981: 21);10 the
considerable effect in these pictures is achieved when the narrative folded
therein unfolds into a narrative replacing a memory that was never one’s own
in the first place. In these pictures we find ourselves in a field of fantasised
presence. The connection between these three pictures is somewhat arbitrary;
yet this glimpsed relativity to each other creates an immanent field to which
they all belong and this is how the retrieval mechanisms of the unconscious are
instrumentalised by the clicking of the camera button.
The human unconscious, the human body unites itself with its surroundings
through the camera lens. Seferis had attempted to articulate such feelings in the
past:
I know that my entire life is not going to be enough for me to express what I have been
trying to say for many days now; this union of nature with a simple human body – this
worthless thing or this superhuman thing, as they might say today […]. But in order to say
what you want to say you must create another language and to nurture it for years on end
with whatever it is you have loved, whatever it is you have lost, with whatever it is you will
ever find again (Seferis 1977b: 39–40).
Seferis’s photographs work as a different, perhaps minor, discourse layered in a

different manner to linguistic discourse. In these photographs one can discern
that it is the same person taking these photographs; however, the narrative
strand, if one may be allowed this term here, is one of uncoupling personal
memory from photographic memory: memory as stored temporal event is no
longer the work of subjective investment, and its inscription becomes automatic
(Stewart 2007: 127–8). In short, these pictures work as time-images, relating
an implied change in the configuration of the world. Seferis’s photographs
indicate a rupture in the experience of conventional temporality. Seferis has
alluded to a rupture of this sort in his poetry. In ‘Thrush’, he writes:
10
Cf. ‘My body has taken on desiring as intensely as the head, it has gone crazy. You’d think that
it is corrugated like a brain’ (Seferis 1977a: 66).
whoever has never loved will love,

in the light;
and you find yourself
in a large house with many windows open
running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first,
because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds
the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south
your eyes will empty of the light of day

the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent (Seferis 1995: 170).
The imagery in the extract names the moment when the temporal flow is
halted; the experience of regular time is transmogrified into the experience
of a moment when these series of images of time are incompossible; that
is to say, these images of time are combined and synthesised into a specific
manner hitherto unseen (Deleuze 2001: 50). Time-images make time and the
experience of time, the experience of being in time, a central narrative device
of Seferis’s photographs (cf. Sutton 2010: 311). On their own, these pictures
tell one story; when we start discerning themes, then we start reading these
images through the signs they articulate. These images are a repository of sheer
duration, and we have to drill into the depth of these photographic surfaces
to uncover memory. Space subtends in these photographs, but it is ultimately
subsumed into the experience of time as time becomes out of joint presenting
itself in a pure state (Deleuze 1989: 271). In a 1946 diary entry written by
Seferis while he was still on Poros, the photographic gaze inscribes in narrative
this sense of a time out of joint:
Impossible to distinguish the light from silence, silence and the light from tranquillity.
Once hearing would touch a loud bang, a distant voice, a slight twittering. But all of these
were in some way closed off in a different place, like the beating of your heart which you felt
once and then forgot about it. The sea had no surface […]. A feeling that there is another
facet of life […]. A feeling that if an infinitesimal crack were to open in this closed vision,
everything could empty out from the four corners of the horizon and leave you naked and
alone, begging for mercy, sputtering senseless words, lacking that incredible precision you
were witness to (Seferis 1977b: 67–8, original emphasis).
Seferis’s gaze appropriates photographic modes of framing the image of the

world: the world is circumscribed within a narrative where we zoom in and out
of focus continuously. As has previously been noted, all of Seferis’s photographs
were shot in black and white. One could make the assumption that Seferis might
have regarded the black-white-grey values of black and white film as being more
immediate than those of colour film: the black-white-grey reproduction of
the (coloured) real world represented a hitherto unattainable quality in visual
expression (cf. Moholy-Nagy 2003: 93). If we could see the world in black and
white, we would see the world as it really is; black and white photographs ‘more
clearly reveal the actual significance of the photograph, i.e. the world of concepts’
(Flusser 2000: 43).
Seferis might have been also become attracted to black and white film
because black and white photography embodies a modernist aesthetic par
excellence: we come to recognise photography’s perceptual power retroactively
as a disappearing or vanished world. For Seferis, the idea of photography
persists as a way of negotiating the transition into a world where time is out of
joint, a world where polychronic temporalities persist.
The fragmented life of visual perception (in poetry)
David Rodowick has noted that ‘technological innovation always seems to run
ahead of the perceptual and cognitive capacity to manipulate them for our own
ends. It is the failure to arrive at what always comes ahead’ (Rodowick 2007:
176). In the poem ‘In the manner of G.S.’, the only one by Seferis to refer
explicitly to photography, the subject travels along an impressionistic itinerary
traversing Greece in a desperate attempt to establish a pragmatic model for
perception and sight. In the poem, the space traversed becomes an effect of
matter and movement (Grosz 2001: 118). Seferis in the poem attempts to
find how vision is constructed by investigating the, or rather a set of relations
between figure and ground, horizon and object.11 The poem seeks to define
how we define space and time even when we find ourselves adrift as a result of
existential crisis:
to remember (to place oneself in the past), to relocate (to cast oneself elsewhere), is to
occupy the whole of time and the whole of space, even admitting that duration and location
are always specific, always defined by movement and action (Grosz 2001: 119).
In the poem the subject attempts to find how memory in the first two stanzas
gives way to perception:
11
Merleau-Ponty notes that the visible is ‘a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom … in
general a visible is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offering all naked to a vision
which could only be total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior
horizons, ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the
colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation
of this world – less a colour or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colours, a
momentary crystallization of coloured being or of visibility. Between the alleged colours and visible,
we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part
is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things’ (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 132–3).
Strange people! they say they’re in Attica but they’re really

nowhere;
they buy sugared almonds to get married
they carry hair tonic, have their photographs taken
the man I saw today sitting against a background of pigeons
and flowers
let the hands of the old photographer smoothe away the
wrinkles
left on his face by all the birds in the sky (Seferis 1995: 72).
The Real is decomposed into separate contemporaneous images and retinal

retention is what puts the fragmented real back together:12
Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,

curtains of mountains, archipelagos, naked granite.
They call the one ship that sails AG ONIA 937 (ibid).13
Fragmentation of perception is evident even in the perception of the ship’s

name; the image, or rather the perception of the image, is fragmentary. Seferis
as the roaming subjectivity of the poem not only refers to photography but also
appropriates a photographic mode of representation. A paradigm shift is implied
in Figs 8.2 and 8.3: the very act of seeing is untethered from being bound to a
very specific time and place. Seferis in his photographs comes to question how
one sees and perceives the world through the camera lens: what is it that the
world makes one feel, see and understand? How is our understanding of the
world transformed through photography?
The serial nature of the diary is somewhat akin to photography; the accretion
of diary entries and their registering of facts, sensations, recollections and
reflections into an autobiographical narrative reminds us to a certain extent of
a photographic archive and its mosaic-like structure.14 What secrets regarding
the subject are to be recovered will be recovered in an oblique yet active manner.
We discover the subject which is not so much divided as refracted through
both an autobiographical and a photographic discourse: this fragmentation
is a rhetorical gesture, a narrative memory of the subject’s resistance to
its own ideas, a map of the subject’s complex interactions with the world.
12
The line from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (‘ὁρῶμεν ἀνθοῦν πέλαγος Αἰγαῖον νεκροῖς’) embedded
in the next stanza of the poem also hints at the fragmented proliferation of images (manifest in the
form of bodies).
13
Barthes notes: ‘each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death’ (1981: 97)
and that there is another punctum, ‘no longer of form but of intensity … . Time, the lacerating emphasis of
the noeme (‘that has been’), its pure representation’ (1981: 96).
14
‘The photographic image partakes more of the nature of a mosaic than of a drawing or painting’
(Weston 1985: 142).
Figure 8.3 George Seferis, Tolo, 1938

Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image B_4_10
In pictures like the one taken in Tolo in 1938 (Fig. 8.3), we observe the development
of the poet’s gaze; we become witness to the poet locating aesthetic reality within
the actual world. This task is what gives the world meaning. This sort of perceptual
epiphany is particularly apparent in Seferis’s poetry as the poet’s ability to see
achieves ‘its most expressive crystallisation’ (Levitt quoted in Sutton 2009: 105).
The craggy, rocky formations, the sheerness of the landscape, the way the light
falls intimate a non-human reality, a non-human state of affairs. The photographs
might feel somewhat busy with the jagged angles of the rocks but they also feel
austere, if not downright severe in their composition.
Every photographic experience is an experience of what is no longer there.
Susan Sontag exclaims: ‘You are not there in a picture, and that is where some of
the anxiety comes in; there is nothing you can do when you look at a photograph’
(Sontag 2003: 64). Every photograph is an act that captures time by cribbing it from
its flow: photography is a process through which the natural flow of time is pilfered.
It is the ability of the photograph to invent, as Barthes tells us, a counter-memory.15
This in turn opens up the question of temporality, as we enter the temporal flow of
each image;16 every photographic image appears as an uncompromising flat mirror
seemingly bending and twisting around us, creating a membrane trapping us in
the unfolding moment captured in it (Sutton 2009: 62).17 Much as the diary is the
form given to the trace of existence, that is to say the very stylisation of existence,
the photograph is the capture of a moment in time using mechanical apparatuses.
Where an accretion of diary entries composes an authorial subjectivity, an accretion
of photographs creates an oblique yet immanent trajectory of the perception, and by
extension the subjectivity, of the photographer as mediated by mechanical means. By
writing every day, the text produces a subjectivity; by taking photographs on a regular
basis as Seferis did, one witnesses how one sees the world, oneself and the relation
between oneself and the world through the use of the photographic camera. It is
in this way that the world undergoes a transfiguration through art.18 Photography
functions as a tracing of the image of the world that begins by ‘selecting or isolating,
by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends
to reproduce’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 11). For Seferis photography creates
a (virtual) space wherein the invention, reflection and refraction of subjectivity is
coded through the exchange of actual and virtual identities (Sutton 2009: 136). We
have been trained to read Seferis’s photographs either through our knowledge of the
poems or our knowledge of the diaries and letters, but when we look at pictures like
the ones taken early on in Seferis’s photographic activity, the Seurat-like, granular
surfaces of the photographs invent their own abstractions, their own organization of
the picture plane (Fig. 8.4). The faces in these granular pictures become landscapes
of narratives and history themselves (cf. Sutton 2009: 176).
15
‘Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory … but it actually blocks memory,
quickly becoming counter-memory’ (Barthes 1981: 91).
16
Poet and photographer Andreas Embirikos noted on this, in his poem ‘Shutter’ [1960]: ‘And
now that the shutter has opened and closed like an impartial eye and time has been captured, reflection
augments life itself and gives every image the movement and flexibility that drags its most occluded
meaning warm from the depths of its (very own) source. And this is how the shutter completely
transforms the image; from a static moment (that might as well be bolted) the shutter transforms
the image into a varied, graceful dance of hours and plastic bodies, into the tangible, fluttering
materialisation of all visions and all desires ’ (Embirikos 2002: 29).
17
Barthes notes that ‘with the photograph we enter into flat death’ (1981: 92).
18
Deleuze succinctly deals with the significance of art in everyday life: ‘There is no other aesthetic
problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life’ (1994: 293). Guattari supplements Deleuze’s
statement by noting that ‘Art must insert itself into a social network to celebrate the Universe of art
as such … . [these sublime sensations act micro-politically by] rupturing with forms and significations
circulating trivially in the social field’ (1995: 130–31).
Figure 8.4 George Seferis, London, 1924

Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image A_43
Photographs taken during the course of Seferis’s diplomatic career serve not
only as mementos of a tempestuous time but also map the endurance of the human
subject in the passage of time. The endurance of the human subject in time is
a central narrative (and ethical) concern of Seferis, evident in all of his writing.
One only needs to remember poems like the sixteenth in the poetic sequence
Mythistorema and its depiction of a persecuted Orestes, or certain diary entries.
A characteristic passage from the diaries is the following: ‘But it is something
heavier to store inside your guts the sudden extermination of a lively world with
its light, its shadows, its ceremonies of happiness and sorrow, its dense net of life
[…]. In this theatre a tragedy without end was staged for it was never allowed its
cathartic ending’ (Seferis 1977b: 224). In photography, the theme of the endurance
of the subject in time manifests, in all the minute details that no one has really
noticed, the details that give life and perception of life depth and substance. Seferis
himself noted as much:
I should preliminarily make a general observation: since I travel it so happens that I am

witness to things my reader has not seen, things I copy, things I could venture as far as
saying that I photograph; I think they are easy to comprehend; I do not expand them
out of a sheer dislike for waffling and this is wherein my ‘sin’ lies (Seferis 1991, quoted in
Papargyriou 2008: 100).
Figure 8.5 George Seferis, Korytsa, 1937

Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image A_6_4
Photography thus functions as a narrative prosthesis simultaneously reinstating an

omitted narrative while taking the place of narrative. It is as if these photographs
act as spectres of what should have been observed but has not been; spectres of
stories in the margin.
Seferis’s photographs, in conclusion, function as contracted narratives where
the photographer will have to wrestle with probably what is the most significant
aesthetic problem: ‘the insertion of art into everyday life’ (Deleuze 1994: 171). In
certain photographs, the poet discovers art in everyday life: he captures movement,
emotion and individual experience of multiple temporalities all in the same picture
(Fig. 8.5). He takes a picture tracing fleeting time and stagnant time in different
manifestations within the same image. The multiplicity of human experience in

pictures like these is marked by the different velocities of the elements making up
the picture.
Subjectivity in Seferis’s poetry, diary and photographs appears to be a composite
substance, an aggregate of vital forces, habits and polychronic temporalities.
The self is not a determining principle itself; rather, it is determined by the
convergence of series of other subjectivities captured on film, other composite
substances generated by the very act of photography. Photography, as used by

Seferis, encodes the creation of subjectivity and creation of a work of art; these
burst forth from the folding in of inner and outer world as the relation between
them comes into being. Concepts of identity and self are not only captured in
Seferis’s photography but also contested and transformed when the forces to
affect and to be affected contained therein push both photographer and viewer
into meditating on the encounters which increase one’s capacity to act in and
interact with the world. It is in this sense that photography for Seferis acts as an
index and narrative of his history to affect and be affected.
References
Barthes, R. (1977), Image, Music, Text, translated by S. Heath, New York: Hill and
Wang.
Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida, translated by R. Howard, New York: Hill and
Wang.
Barthes, R. (1986), The Rustle of Language, translated by R. Howard, New York:
Hill and Wang.
Benjamin, W. (1999), Illuminations, translated by H. Zorn, London: Pimlico.
Bergson, H. (1912), An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by T.E. Hulme, New
York: Random House.
Bergson, H. (1991), Matter and Memory, translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer,
New York: Zone.
Brunet, F. (2009), Photography and Literature, London: Reaktion.
Burgin, V. (2003), ‘Looking at Photographs’, in L. Wells (ed.), The Photography
Reader, London: Routledge, 130–37.
Crary, J. (2001), Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture,
Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: Time-Image, translated by H. Tomlinson and
R. Galeta, Minesota: Minesota University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, translated by P. Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1997), Bergsonism, translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam,
New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (2001), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by T. Conley,
London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, translated by B. Massumi,

London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1987), Dialogues, translated by H. Tomlinson and
B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press.
Derrida, J. (1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by E. Prenowitz,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dickinson, E. (1960), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by T.H.
Johnson, Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Embirikos, A. (2002), Οκτάνα, Athens: Ikaros.
Flusser, V. (2000), Towards a Philosophy of Photography, translated by A. Matthews,
London: Reaktion.
Georgis, G. (2004), Η Κωνσταντινούπολη του Γιώργου Σεφέρη, Athens: Kastaniotis.
Grosz, E. (2001), Architecture from the Outside, Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by P. Bains
and J. Pefanis, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Guattari, F. (1998), ‘Pragmatic/Machinic: Discussion with Felix Guattari
(19 March 1985)’ in C.J. Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari:
Intersections and Animations, New York: Guilford Press.
Heijinian, L. (2003), My Life in the Nineties, New York: Shark.
Ignatieff, M. (1987), The Russian Album, New York: Viking.
Jay, P. (1994), ‘Posing: Autobiography and the Subject of Photography’, in
K. Ashley, L. Gilmore and G. Peters (eds), Autobiography and Postmodernism,
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 191–211.
Kasdaglis, E. Ch. (ed.) (1990), Κύπρος, μνήμη και αγάπη: με το φακό του Γιώργου
Σεφέρη, Nicosia: Cultural Centre of Laiki Bank.
Kittler, F.A. (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Kofman, S. (1998), Camera Obscura: Of Ideology, translated by W. Straw, Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Laruelle, F. (2011), The Concept of Non-Photography, translated by R. Mackay,
London: Urbanomic.
Laruelle, F. (2012), Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics, translated by D.S.
Burk, Minneapolis: Univocal.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1969), The Visible and the Invisible, translated by A. Lingis,
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Moholy-Nagy, L. (2003), ‘A New Instrument of Vision’, in L. Wells (ed.), The
Photography Reader, London: Routledge, 92–6.
Papageorgiou-Venetas, A. (2006), Η Αθήνα του Μεσοπολέμου μέσα από τις Μέρες
του Γιώργου Σεφέρη, Athens: Ikaros.
Papargyriou, E. (2008), ‘Preliminary Remarks on George Seferis’s Visual Poetics’,
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (32.1), 80–103.
Rodowick, D. (2007), The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Seferis, G. (1975a), Μέρες Α΄, Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (1975b), Μέρες B΄, Athens: Ikaros.

Seferis, G. (1977a), Μέρες Γ΄, Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (1977b), Μέρες E΄, Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (1986a), Μέρες Δ΄, Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (1986b), Μέρες ΣΤ΄, Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (1991), ‘Κυπριακές’ Επιστολές του Σεφέρη (1954–1962): Από την
αλληλογραφία του με τον Γ. Π. Σαββίδη, edited by K. Kostiou, Athens: Cultural
Foundation of the Bank of Cyprus.

Seferis, G. (1995), Complete Poems, translated by E. Keeley and P. Sherrard,
London: Anvil.
Seferis, G. (1998), Ποιήματα, 19th edition, Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (1999), George Seferis: Photographer, New York: Foundation for Hellenic
Culture.
Seferis, G. (2000), Οι φωτογραφίες του Γιώργου Σεφέρη, Athens: MIET.
Seferis, G. (2003a), Δοκιμές Α΄ (1936–1947), Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (2003b), Δοκιμές B΄ (1936–1947), Athens: Ikaros.
Seferis, G. (2005), Tρεις μέρες στα μοναστήρια της Καππαδοκίας, Athens: Centre
for Asia Minor Studies.
Seferis, G. (2007), Six Nights on the Acropolis, translated by S. Matthias, River Vale,
NJ: Cosmos.
Seferis, G. (2010), Three Days in the Monasteries of Cappadocia, translated by
P. Mackridge, Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies.
Smith, S. and J. Watson (2010), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting
Life Narratives (2nd edn), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sontag, S. (2003), ‘Photography within the Humanities’, in L. Wells (ed.),
The Photography Reader, London: Routledge, 59–66.
Stewart, G. (2007), Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Sutton, D. (2009), Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time,
Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.
Sutton, D. (2010), ‘Immanent Images’, in D.N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterimages
of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press,
307–26.
Weston, E. (1985), Edward Weston on Photography, edited by P.C. Bunnell, Salt
Lake City: Peregrine Smith.
9
Textual Contexts of Consumption:

The Greek Literary Photobook
Eleni Papargyriou
In 1980, after a series of successful collections of short stories, Yorgos Ioannou

published Omonoia 1980, a relatively slim but highly original volume of prose
fiction, in which his text was combined with photographs by Andreas Belias.1 The
appearance of Ioannou’s book in 1980 suggests that compared to other European
countries, where literary collaborations with photographers were definable
modernist moments,2 Greek literary publications belatedly discovered modernity
in the usage of photographic images.3 Bringing in photography to a literary
book evidently modified the standards of what Greek modernity considered to
be appropriate visual props for a literary publication: until 1980 seminal poetry
collections, for instance, had been ornamented with etchings or engravings by
painters associated with the generation of the 1930s such as Yannis Tsarouchis
and Yannis Moralis (Ikaros 1993). The fact that literary collaborations with
photographers had no precedent until 1980 may be suggestive of photography’s
low status among the visual arts in Greece and of a slowly adapting national
literary market that until then was too suspicious towards the visual properties of
photography to consider it a worthy companion to the literary text.
Ioannou’s experimentation with the photographic medium did not immediately
catch on. In the decade that followed the publication of Omonoia 1980, numerous
compilations of literary text and photograph appeared in the book market, but they
were mostly anthologies rather than original works produced specifically for an
independent publication (Yiannitsiou and Leivana 2000). It was only in the mid-
1
The collaboration with the photographer evolved through the initiative of the publisher
Myrsini Zorba, who had read a short piece by Ioannou on Omonoia in the daily I Kathimerini (Ioannou
1984: 268).
2
See, for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky with Alexander Rodchenko (1923) or Paul Eluard
with Man Ray (1935) (Parr and Badger 2004: 91, 104).
3
I have suggested elsewhere that Ioannou’s Omonoia 1980 is postmodern in its photographic
sensibility (Papargyriou 2013: 32).
193
1990s that a few more examples of this new genre appeared, such as the volume
with text by Derrida and photographs by Jean-François Bonhomme Athènes à
l’ombre de l’Acropole (1996) (see Oikonomou 2013, and Hamilakis, this volume),
first published in Greece in a bilingual Greek and French edition,4 and Michel
Fais’s Ultimate Gaze, a volume that combines an anthology of texts on the theme of
death with a series of epitaph photographs taken in graveyards (by Fais himself ).
As photographs of real funerary photographs placed on tombstones, the images in
Ultimate Gaze function on a meta-photographic, meta-diegetic level.

However, from 2000 onwards, there has been a noticeable boost in such
publications, with at least eight titles published between 2000 and 2012.
Prominent among them are Michel Fais’s The City on her Knees (2002, photographs
by Fais), Soti Triantafyllou’s Los Angeles (2007, photographs by Petros Nikoltsos)
and Christos Chryssopoulos’s Flashlight between the Teeth (2012, photographs by
Chryssopoulos), three volumes that uniformly follow Ioannou’s preoccupation
with urban life. These volumes produce complex narratives and require novel
reading processes. As is stated in the introduction to a recent volume on the
photobook, they ‘require us to construct and refine practices of reading “more than
the articulation of a structure of knowledge”’ (Armstrong 1998, quoted by Di Bello,
Wilson and Zamir 2012: 7).
The book quoted above is only one example of a recent pool of publications
on writing and photography.5 Such volumes have reignited an interest in the
complex synergies of text and photographic image. However, despite the ample
discussion of seminal case studies, such as Walker Evans’s collaboration with
James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, there
are still significant gaps in the codification of mechanisms that explain ways in
which, on the one hand, images narrate either alone or in relation to text and,
on the other hand, readers read images with or without text. While in the last 40
years there have been enough attempts to systematise narrative functions of texts
(in the branch of literary theory that has been deemed narratology), the interrelation
between photographic and literary texts is too recent a phenomenon to have
received similar attention. A literary text that is interspersed with photographs
cannot be simply concretised in the fashion of reading fiction, configured on
lexical codes and on visualising the text’s schematic structures (Iser 1980). On
the other hand, the photograph that is consumed within a textual context cannot
be simply decoded in the conventional manner of reading images. While tracing
the appearance of the literary photobook in Greece and discussing its themes,
in this chapter I address a number of questions on the interpolation of literature
and photography: how does presentation within a literary context affect the visual
4
It should still be investigated why there were no immediate followers to Ioannou’s experiment
with photography. It could be the case that the appearance of such books declined due to a new wave
of prose fiction that became popular during the 1980s and 1990s.
5
Rabb 1995; Scott 1999; Cunningham, Fisher and Mays 2005; Brunet 2009; Beckmann and
Weissberg 2013.
Textual contexts of consumption 195
properties of the photograph? To what extent does the text increase in credibility
through its backing by photographs? Should we term the combination of literary
text and photographic image a symbiosis, which would make such a book a sum of
its (independent) parts, or a hybrid, a third genre, neither photography nor fiction,
but the space in between?
The emergence of the literary photobook as a genre
In the decades that followed the announcement of the invention of photography

at the French Academy, three ways of consuming photographic prints became
available to the public: firstly, individual daguerreotypes could be purchased directly
from photographers or brokers; secondly, they could be looked at and subsequently
purchased at exhibitions, such as the London Great Exhibition of Works of Industry
of All Nations in 1851 or the Paris Exhibition at the Palais d’Industrie in 1855
(Haworth-Booth 1997: 25, 36). Thirdly, it was possible to purchase photographs
published in albums. This practice appeared at an early stage. Henry Fox Talbot’s
The Pencil of Nature, published in six instalments between 1944 and 1946, was an
album that incorporated original prints.6 The title Talbot chose suggested nature
acted as the subject of writing, as an agent that retained authority in its own self-
depiction. Photography, as the chemical process that permanently fixed the image
on glass or paper, claimed its ancestry in the writing, and the photographic print
was an artifact that contained narrative properties. Talbot heavily annotated each
of the 24 plates with text, describing the location and the circumstances of each
shot and giving a fair amount of technical detail on their production. If the plates
and text in his book do not comprise a ‘story’ in the conventional sense, they surely
‘narrate’ the invention of photography and the numerous possibilities that the new
medium offered to the public.
Parr and Badger’s The Photobook, the most comprehensive history of the
photobook available to date, suggests that text was a later addition to the
photograph. Such was the case of Francis Firth’s album Egypt and Palestine (1862–
63), with texts adding factual background to the photographs, and Street Life in
London by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith (1877–78), where texts provided
sociological context to the socially underprivileged depicted in the images, often
embellishing their visual content with verbal sensationalism. Text was thought of
as annotation, as verbal illustration to the photographs, which points to the fact
that photography in these volumes was considered the primary matter.
Literary text entered the photobook even later. Parr and Badger suggest (without
spelling it out explicitly) that the addition of literary text to photographic publications
resulted directly from the attempt to disassociate photography from its documentary
6
Until about 1890 photographs were printed in books from photolithographic reproductions.
The halftone process enabled direct printing of photographs without transferral, thus allowing for
photographs to be printed alongside text.
function and elevate it to the status of a fine art. Pictorialism, already an established
photographic mentality in the middle of the nineteenth century, rejected realism and
aimed at the fictional effect of painting, employing techniques such as soft focus and
multiple exposures. Photographers with pictorial aspirations welcomed literary text
as the appropriate companion to images that registered themselves as aesthetic rather
than documentary events. In 1874–75 Julia Margaret Cameron produced a series
of photographic prints to illustrate Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Her
project, implemented at the poet’s own request, may be the first attempt to employ
photography as a means to stage the literary text, and the first book in which literary
text and photographic image do not just coexist but actively interact. Cameron’s
photographs rendered Tennyson’s epic text in a manner that displayed theatricality
(Papargyriou 2012: 213–14); her endeavour, seen by some as a failure (Gernsheim
1948: 61), paved the way for modernist experimentations with image and text, such
as Moholy-Nagy’s and Man Ray’s photobooks in the late 1920s and 1930s (Parr
and Badger 2004: 82–114). In these examples, emblematic of a host of publications
with similar goals, text and image are juxtaposed in a way that coerces the reader to
read one against the other. Thus, in its modernist conception, the literary photobook
surpasses the notions of description and illustration as functions of the text and the
photographic image respectively.7 The text does not describe the photograph in the
sense of verbally reproducing its visual content (as happens in literary texts that can
be termed photographic ekphrases), but takes a reading of the image as the starting
point for expanding on its visual vocabulary. Conversely, the image does not illustrate
the text. Despite the traditional views that see the photograph as providing more
precise information, the image does not clarify the ambiguities offered in the text.
Rather, the photograph runs against the text, replacing its ambiguities with more
vagueness and gaps of a different sort.8
The Greek literary photobook
The Greek literary photobook confirms the contention that ‘when compared to
literary texts, an older and more established cultural form, photographs are considered
the newcomers, if not the troublemakers’ (Brunet 2009: 8). To a large number of
contemporary Greek readers the authorial voice of photographs still appears as
inferior to that of literature. Omonoia 1980 belongs to Ioannou’s late output and
7
The subversion of traditional roles of text and image as descriptive and illustrative can go as far
as their complete reversal: in Hans Bellmer’s Les Jeux de la poupée Paul Eluard’s texts are considered to
be the illustrations (Parr and Badger 2004: 107).
8
Reading the photobook also requires taking into account its paratextual settings, the layout
and the graphic organisation of image and printed word. The precise pairing of the photograph with the
text on the opposite page produces a significantly different effect from that which emerges when images
just interrupt the flow of text at regular intervals. In addition, the size of photographs, their format and
position on the page are all invested with significance.
crowns his prolific and successful career as a short story writer. Equally, other
authors produced photobooks at a late stage in their careers. Fais, Triantafyllou and
Chryssopoulos had each published a series of critically acclaimed and commercially
successful novels before they embarked on photobooks. A significant number of
photobooks are issued under the author’s name rather than the photographer’s,
which suggests that in Greece the literary text still carries more prominence than
the photographic image. It is the author of the text rather than the photographer
who provides the signature; these books are marketed on the author’s, rather than
the photographer’s good reputation. The predominance of the author is also visible
in the larger printing of their names and their positioning at the top of the cover
and on the book’s spine. The photographers’ names only appear, in smaller print,
under the title. The way these volumes are launched in the book market, appearing
in the literature rather than in the photography section of bookstores, points to the
market’s preference for text over image, if not for an exclusively textual reading of
these books. However, what lies behind the marketing is a syntactically complex
relation that affects our reading of literary and photographic codes.
The first photobook of Greek interest (as opposed to the first Greek photobook)
is likely to be the volume Dans le sillage d’Ulysse (1933),9 a collaborative photobook
by the Swiss photographer Frédéric Boissonnas with the French classicist Victor
Bérard.10 In 1912 Boissonnas and Bérard replicated what they believed was
Odysseus’s journey in the Mediterranean and took photographs at stations they
identified as Homeric loci. Their project aimed at using the camera to authenticate
the (fictional) geography of the Odyssey. Juxtaposing the Homeric text to the
photographs, the volume coerced the reader/viewer to think of the photographic
image as proof for a scientific ‘truth’; that the Odyssey was no mere collation of
legends and that it was, rather, a ‘geographic document, a poetic but not distorted
representation of a certain Mediterranean’ (Bérard and Boissonnas 2011: 9). The
photographs were not to display a possible setting for the adventures of the Homeric
hero; they were to showcase their exact location, taking photography’s indexical
function to the extreme: this is the island of Phaeaceans, this is Eumaeus’s cave.
The proposed agenda of continuity between the ancient and the modern worlds is
not hard to discern here. The viewer is to think that the Mediterranean (including
Greece) has remained unchanged from Homer’s time to the present, a symptom
of a process termed by Johannes Fabian as allochronism (1983: 32–3). The project
suggested resistance to modernisation – the landscape remains perennial – despite
the interference of a very modern and very subjective medium, the photographic
lens. Despite its results, the relation between text and image in this project is
static and one-dimensional. The text annotates the image and vice versa. Under
no circumstances is the image thought to do something more to the text than to
merely illustrate it. And under no circumstances should the text be thought to
do more than provide the frame in which the photograph should be understood.
9
In Greece the title appeared as Following Ulysses’ Vessel in 2011.
10
For an in-depth analysis of their project, see Oikonomou 2011.
There is no modernist intention in this project; it does not experiment with mixing
the properties of the literary and the visual.
The same is the case with literary quotations used as epigraphs in photographic
albums. Voula Papaioannou’s Black Album, which collates documentary photographs
from the Athenian famine of 1941–42, quotes the line ‘… Τί με χρὴ σιγᾶν; Τί δὲ
μὴ σιγᾶν; Τί δὲ θρηνῆσαι;’ from Euripides’s Trojan Women (110–11). According to
Papaioannou, the engraver Yannis Kefallinos, who designed the book, dismissed
the possibility of including more text (Konstantinou 2006: 22). His decision
implied the belief that the intensity of the photographs as documentary evidence
for the Greek humanitarian crisis would be compromised by text.
Ioannou’s Omonoia 1980 is the first book that attempts an experimental
staging of literary text and image. Ioannou’s text consists of a main narrative body,
taking up the greater part of the page, and a second, independent text, which
runs through the pages, placed on top of the main text. The independent text
resembles an epigraph and evidently works as a caption to both the photographs
and the main text; elliptical and monumental, it teems with quotations from the
Bible but also from Cavafy, whose queer poetics permeate the atmosphere of
Ioannou’s text.11 Ioannou’s book contains 66 photographs, the highest number in
any book discussed here. The photographs are placed on the right hand side of
the page spread, producing pairs of text and image that directly converse with
one another, comment on one another or subvert one another. Under Ioannou’s
instructions, Belias photographed the frequenters of the square; visitors in coffee
shops, people engaging in daily trade, commuters entering and exiting public
transport or just hanging out in public spaces. Most of the images depict young
males, photographed from behind, an angle that underlines the erotic aspect of the
gaze that captures them. According to Christopher Robinson, who was the first to
provide an insightful study on the photography in Omonoia 1980, the photographs
do four things:
(i) they represent the stereotypically macho, e.g. soldiers; (ii) they parody the stereotypically
macho, e.g. child with gun; (iii) they represent the ‘feminine’ through the choice of non-
macho bodies or through pose […]. But it is the fourth element, the gazer’s ability to choose
a sexual angle on his male subjects, which is the most important element in this respect – the
photographs show a marked preference for backsides, often emphasised by pose (Robinson
2001: 90–91).
Ioannou’s Omonoia of the early 80s is a gay focal point, a queer locale that
stands at odds with the classical and touristy façade generally associated with
11
Cavafy’s poem ‘In this way’ [Etsi], in which the narrator dreamingly muses on the beautiful
face of a young man on a pornographic photograph bought clandestinely on the street, bears a strong
resemblance to the accidental, quasi-voyeuristic, context of Omonoia 1980. What inspires the connection
with Cavafy is the accidental encounter, the arrest of male faces out of context, which then become part
of a different life, the observer’s life, and yield to a new narrative.
the capital. The text pretends to be an essay, but its factual documentary tone
is often obscured by observations that give away Ioannou’s own involvement
and personal interest. Despite not being a photographer, Ioannou prepared the
writing of Omonoia 1980 during a long period of close observation: ‘for a long
time you used to go to Omonoia at different times of the day to observe changes.
You used to set your alarm at 3 or 4 a.m. and you dashed off to witness what
the square looks like at this time,’ he reports in his autobiographical text ‘To
thyself ’ (Ioannou 1984: 268). Ioannou perceived the square as a space for sexual
opportunity, a space heavily charged with desire. He did not concern himself
with the physical details of sex, but developed a poetics of the gaze as an outlet
for desire, as a sensual tool that modifies both the agent of seeing and the subject
of his gaze. What could be conventionally termed voyeurism is transformed
here into reciprocal communication through the eyes. Through Belias’s images
the reader consumes the desire for those males Ioannou happened upon on the
street; as a result of the photographs taking centre stage in this book project,
the reader rests his gaze upon details of their bodies, as did Ioannou and Belias
before him.
Ioannou generally thinks of photography as fragmentary and contingent,
most effective when it is unfaithful to itself. Fetishistically evoking the human
body, the photograph can never be complete; it can only be present in fragments,
semiotic snippets that need to be reassembled by the observer.12 By the same token,
Omonoia is not a complete space; it consists of accidental snapshots that can be
assembled by individual viewers in different ways. While celebrating the square’s
presence, Ioannou at the same time mourns its loss, knowing his writing does not
monumentalise its dynamics in any duration and his images will soon be surpassed
by future ones. Despite Ioannou’s proclamation that his text is not historical or
nostalgic, it essentially photographs Omonoia as a history, even if this history shapes
itself in the eyes of the future reader. He is fascinated by the obvious social changes
in the square’s urban landscape, from the shift in its demographics to historical
locations such as the Café Neon and the demise of old cinemas and hotels. Text
and image work harmoniously in capturing human ruins too; the fleeting figures
of men, their accidental movement and posture in their unawareness that they are
being photographed. Musing on the frequenters of the square, Ioannou realises
that in a hundred years they will all have become shadows:
12
In Ioannou’s short story ‘O Batis’ of 1964 (Ioannou 1980: 52–4), set during the Axis
Occupation, two adolescent boys discover a set of torn pornographic photographs in the churchyard
of Agia-Sofia in Thessaloniki on Easter Saturday. Batis, the nickname of the narrator’s companion,
reassembles the torn pictures, but the end result is not faithful to the initial images. Reassembled, the
photographs display fictional bodies with unconventional anatomies in the most unusual complexes and
postures, and awaken the wildest sexual fantasies in the two boys. After the photographs disappeared
from the churchyard lawn, the narrator and Batis enter the church and imagine themselves breaking
down and reassembling the saints in the church’s mosaics. The three-page story finishes with Batis’s
mutilated body, massacred by the Nazis, being mourned by his friend in the morgue.
Gazing at this commotion, I feel like doing and saying what Xerxes did, according to
Herodotus, when he inspected his army and fleet. After he had blessed his good fortune, his
eyes welled up. ‘Not even one of those will be in a hundred years’, he said. Yes, not even one –
nothing (Ioannou 1987: 138).
Photographic flânerie
Ioannou constantly negotiates notions of the familiar and the unfamiliar. He

narrates Omonoia from the point of view of someone who is familiar with its
secret codes and geography. The unfamiliar takes the abstract form of desire;
despite knowing the square’s every nook and cranny he constantly roams it anew
to savour novel images of unknown men.
Urban space and urban flânerie constitute seminal topoi in the Greek literary
photobook, complying with modernist trends in photography, aptly summarised
by Alexandra Moschovi:
The modernist myth of the artist’s genius, of his special ability to perceive, of his technical
capacity is encapsulated in the snapshot which celebrates Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive
moment’, which, combined with the notion of the flâneur, urged many Greek photographers
in the decades of 1970 and 1980 to search for the unexpected, the contradictory, the
paradox in black and white, the snapshot rendering of everyday life (Moschovi 2002: 128).
Michel Fais in The City on her Knees (2002) and Chryssopoulos in Flashlight
between the Teeth (2012)13 revolve around social aspects of life in Athens, while
Soti Triantafyllou explores life in Los Angeles. The photographs produced in these
volumes belong to street photography, a photographic genre that evolved alongside
urban expansion.14 Urban modernity is, again, short-lived, if not moribund. The
moment the city is captured on the lens it already becomes obsolete, it is a city
that has been, violently surpassed by future depictions. Writing the city collects
fragments of city life like flies in amber. Pasted next to photographic images, these
writing instances record, in equal measure to photography, the city as it has existed
in time, a city that is no longer, a city that in its photographic actuality essentially
defies any notion of the contemporary.15
13
Christos Chryssopoulos’s Hugarleiftur [Encounters] (2003, photographs by Diane Neumaier),
narrates Reykjavik.
14
Graham Clarke points out the symbiotic relation of urban development and photography:
photography is an essential component of urban action; late nineteenth-century city growth cannot
be thought outside the climate of documentation in which the camera played a pivotal role (Clarke
1997: 75).
15
Photography actively contributes to the writing of the city in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. The instantaneity of street photography has had an impact on narrative forms describing the city.
Gotsi (2004: 65) claims that ‘writing the city occurs on the one hand through the novel, on the other
The insistence of photobooks on cities underlines the genre’s ancestry in

travelogues and other types of travel literature. Derrida’s philosophical explication
of Athens mediated through photography in Athens, Still Remains yields to a
critical understanding of photography as the conceptual cluster ‘light-antiquity-
ruins-death’. His text developed as a retrospective photographic annotation to
the photographs given to him by Bonhomme before he set off. Carrying these
photographs with him as he travelled around Greece dictated a photographic
filtering of his travelling experience. The photographs could be said to have worked
as a fixed premeditation on the scenery; what he saw had been anticipated by
its photographic representation. Derrida’s journey was haunted by the idea of
death, crystallised in the recurring leitmotif: ‘we owe ourselves to death’. The line
is obsessively repeated throughout the text to the effect of a photocopied feuille-
volante the city wanderer constantly stumbles upon in different locations. What
triggers its relevance there, in the blinding Attic light, is Athens’s simultaneous
antiquity and modernity. Antiquity and modernity overlap in the ever-present
pattern of change, recorded against the natural backdrop of the ethereal Athenian
landscape and the fierce writing of Attic light.16 Antiquity is not perceived by
Derrida as neoclassical revival, but as experiencing the past in the visual context
of material remains. What these remains reveal is a life that has become obsolete,
but is still preserved in the landscape, petrified, transformed into ruins. Thus, ruins
are not monumental, but reminders of death: ‘Photographs are untranslatable not
because their images are recognisable (Athens, the Acropolis), but because they
succeed in saying to us that we owe ourselves to death’ (Derrida 2010: 69). The
photographic recording of Athens’s demise becomes part of its history.
In his photographic understanding of Athens, Derrida essentially eliminates
the boundaries between antiquity and modernity. Antiquity is not a perennial
state, known to us as ‘classical’; it becomes subject to the passage of time and to
death. On the other hand, like the photographic image that ages the moment it is
taken, what we call modern is so instantaneous that it becomes obsolete at its birth.
The ruins of modernity are displayed on a similar pedestal to ancient busts: Derrida
regards the flea markets of Monastiraki and Andrianou Street as their museums
(or perhaps their graveyards); technological junk of previous decades with little or
no use value, such as old telephones and typewriters, is pasted in the volume next
to ancient epigraphs, stubs of ancient columns and statues. The modernity of the
camera also becomes obsolete. In a self-reflexive, Benjaminian manner, Derrida
evokes the death of photography in the image of the old photographer falling
hand through short narrative forms, whose exact genre is not always precise, particularly since mixing
fictional and journalistic elements encourages hybridity.’ She later identifies these forms as texts that dub
themselves ‘images’, ‘scenes’ or ‘pages’ (Gotsi 2004: 73).
16
A few years later Thanasis Valtinos, one of the most eminent contemporary Greek prose
authors, joined forces with Bonhomme in a literary photo-book that takes off from Derrida’s obsession
with light, entitled Opening of Light (2001).
asleep on the Acropolis, amidst his dated equipment. Athens, the capitalist city of
the mid-1990s, teems with deaths and rebirths.
Despite their different focus, the three cases of Greek photobooks I will go
on to look at conform to this paradigm of modernity that is disturbed and even
eradicated by the photographic medium, adapting it to their theme of the city’s
demise in equal measure. The accidental is featured in Michel Fais’s The City on
her Knees.17 The photographs were produced during a period of intense grief after
Fais lost his father, a Jew from Komotini. As a tribute to his marginal status in a
predominantly Christian Orthodox society, Fais walked the streets of Athens with
a camera at hand, photographing subjects belonging to ethnic and social minorities;
the homeless, destitute migrants and prostitutes, the deprived citizens of the streets.
Unlike Ioannou who writes in the first person and underpins his own presence
by including photographs of himself, Fais effaces himself, conceding voice to
his subjects: the texts accompanying his images are the subjects’s imagined
monologues. In Fais’s book, Clive Scott’s unusual claim that street photography
is not documentary (since it does not really address a viewer), but veers towards a
kind of soliloquy (Scott 2007: 57–89) proves to be relevant: if street photography
does not serve as an aid to remember a city, it produces a subjective snippet,
a narrative that does recall the city in its totality, but performs the city as a
fragmentary scene on a theatre stage. The subjects of Fais’s monologues, elliptical
and often interrupted, perform the city, each in their subjective manner. Like
his subjects, Fais gathers his material in the streets in the manner of an urban
flâneur, seeking, observing, and constantly being taken by surprise. His subjects
also reflect this penchant for free-wheeling discovery: ‘I find a button. I bend
down, I pick it up, I put it in my pocket. I find a hair pin. I bend down, I pick
it up, I put it in my pocket. I find a smudgy piece of paper. I bend down, I pick it
up, I put it in my pocket. God exists in the detail’ (Fais 2002: 41).
Fais’s Athens subtly, but nevertheless critically, hints at the by-products
of capitalism in the beginning of the new millennium: immigration and social
gaps that have turned areas of the former glorious classical capital into ghettos.
Fais plays with the contrasting images of the pop singer on the poster and
the old female clochard passing by in front of it, while the title of the singer’s
record, ‘Weak Gender’, provides an ironical caption to the picture (Fig. 9.1).
Photography and text are bridged in the use of technological means for
recording discourse; Fais is known for using a tape recorder to document
accidental snippets of conversations. Alternatively, he likes to photograph
text, such as graffiti sprayed on walls: ‘Think about it, I am clean’ (Fig. 9.2).18
17
Widely known as a novelist, Fais has nevertheless been constantly preoccupied with
photographic imagery since the beginning of his writing career; apart from The Ultimate Gaze (1996),
he edited a volume of Nelly’s photography of interwar urban professions. In 2012 he issued Burial Gifts,
another narrative on death which includes images published in The Ultimate Gaze along with some
unpublished ones.
18
‘Clean’ is misspelled in the original.
Figure 9.1 Michel Fais, from The City on her Knees, 2002
Source: Courtesy of the artist
Figure 9.2 Michel Fais, from The City on her Knees, 2002
Often the graffiti betrays the reclusive identity of its author. Fais captures
cases where spelling and grammar are incorrect to point out difference. The
special idiom created by his anonymous subjects suggests a marginal urban
heteroglossia that defines itself against the standardised, ‘correct’ Greek. Fais
is recording the moribund modernity of the capital, a modernity that shapes
itself beyond classical reverberations in the street names, the world-famous
archaeological locations and the idealised glare of the city’s classical past. Like
Ioannou, who constructs a marginal Athens in his queer Omonoia square, Fais
explores marginality in the social, ethnic and linguistic sphere. In their own
terms, both versions of Athens project themselves onto classical Athens to show
that the classical façade, taken for granted, is virtual.
Soti Triantafyllou works on the same premise of deconstructing an urban
legend in the photo-book Los Angeles. The book materialised after Triantafyllou
was contacted by the young photographer Petros Nikoltsos, who sought in her
texts, published previously in two editions in the 1990s, a literary environment
for his photographic images of the American metropolis. Home to the American
cinema industry, Los Angeles stands as an ultra-modern city in popular
imagination. Nikoltsos’s photographs, in equal measure to Triantafyllou’s texts,
present a version of the city removed from Hollywood stereotypes of streets lined
with palm trees, flashy cars and glamorous women posing against sunny skies.
Figure 9.3 Petros Nikoltsos, from Los Angeles, 2007

The photographs are in black and white, taken in deprived areas of the city.
Unusually cropped and blurry, they imitate vernacular, amateur photography,
making a statement against commercial images of the city and its lifestyle
trends (Figs 9.3 and 9.4). Triantafyllou’s texts, selected from two preceding
volumes that had nothing to do with photography, The Sky Train in Stilwell
and Alphabet City, acquired a photographic quality, as they were fragmented
into textual snapshots. Triantafyllou and Nikoltsos explore Los Angeles as
a case study of a city whose unhindered neoliberalism ultimately crushes its
citizens.
Christos Chryssopoulos’s recent Flashlight between the Teeth testifies the
demise of Athens in the current economic crisis. The author conceived the
volume’s title after watching a homeless man holding a torch in his mouth
while scavenging with both hands a rubbish bin for food. The text documents
a visual pilgrimage in the centre of Athens; during a hike in what are now
underprivileged areas of the capital, Chryssopoulos recorded with text
and photographic image the life in the margins, most notably in his short
acquaintance with a homeless man. Chryssopoulos’s deliberately unpolished
account aims at capturing the accidental and the momentary. Often his own
position behind the camera challenges the viewer. For instance, he photographs
Figure 9.4 Petros Nikoltsos, from Los Angeles, 2007

an immigrant who has collapsed on the street holding a paper cup in his hand.
The ethical lesson of this photo is challenged (perhaps even compromised)
by the fact that Chryssopoulos photographed the subject from two different
angles, underscoring the power that distinguishes the photographer from his
subject; a despondent man that has no authority whatsoever in the taking of the
photograph. However, Chryssopoulos’s account of a humanitarian crisis takes
a postmodern turn in the fact that on other occasions he blurs the boundaries
between the subject and object of gaze. In what perhaps is the most intriguing
image in the book, he poses his camera on a street pole to take a photograph
of himself as a homeless man; kneeling on the ground and hiding his face in
his hoodie (Fig. 9.5).
Chryssopoulos’s book reminds the reader that hybridity in these volumes is
closely linked to postmodernity. If perceived from the angle of textual criticism,
in its traditionalist sense, these books pose a problem of classification. Where
do they fit in the continuum between testimony and fiction? Are these texts
and photographs that aim at recording the real world? Or are they phantoms of
reality, spectres of disposition, fictions that just disguise themselves in the attire
of the documentary? How does photography, a practice that had been attributed
documentary properties, work in conjunction with text that present a doubtful
veracity? As in most of his texts, in Omonoia 1980 Ioannou deliberately blurs
the boundaries between reality and fiction:
Figure 9.5 Christos Chryssopoulos, from Flashlight between the Teeth, 2012
But, if I need to historicise, I will at most resort to my memories or to what I consider my

memories, but are in fact fantasies too, with some real pretext of course, because I have not lost
my mind completely, although I would have plenty of reason to lose my mind when speaking
about this square (Ioannou 1987: 10).
Chryssopoulos’s book bears the subtitle ‘An Athenian Chronicle’, yet the
author warns readers that some facts, such as the initial used for the homeless
man’s name and the location where he and the narrator usually met, have
been changed. Moreover, he informs us that the photographs on pages 16,
23 and 33 have been foraged from the internet, which evidently undermines
the first-hand testimonial character of his account. Triantafyllou lent her
texts to a photographer despite the fact that they had nothing to do with
photography. But even in her case, her texts altered in character, becoming
more visual and displaying a more incisive theoretical quality, as recorders
of precariousness which is bound to be surpassed by future moments.
Photography seeks out literature in being understood as a coded text whose
reading is subject to particular stratagems. In the postmodern understanding,
the gap between text and image seems to be diminished. Presented in a literary
context, the photographs become visual soliloquies; reversely, words become
verbal snapshots. Presented in a photographic context, words shake off their
textual quality and become imagistic signs, fleeting as impressions, bound to
be superseded.
The shortcomings of capitalism as depicted in the photobooks of Fais and
Chryssopoulos may be decisive for the future of the Greek literary photobook.
While the synergies of photography and prose fiction in Greece have produced
a hybrid genre that has expanded the boundaries of both, it may well be that the
Greek literary photobook will prove short-lived. Photographic images increase
the cost of publication, and in the current economic climate, fewer publishers
are inclined to invest in expensive publications. Greece’s troubled economic
state, a symptom of postmodernity, may have inspired literary and photographic
collaborations. Yet, it is this troubled economic state that may curb the synergies
of such collaborations in the most poignant fashion.
References
Beckman, K. and L. Weissberg (2013), On Writing with Photography, Minneapolis

and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Bérard, V. and F. Boissonnas (2011), Ακολουθώντας το πλοίο του Οδυσσέα,
translated by A. Sideri, Athens: Agra.
Brunet, F. (2009), Photography and Literature, London: Reaktion.
Chryssopoulos, C. (2012), Φακός στο στόμα, Athens: Polis.
Chryssopoulos, C. and D. Neumaier (2003), Hugarleiftur, Reykjavik: Reykjavik
Art Museum.
Clarke, G. (1997), The Photograph, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cunningham, D., A. Fisher and S. Mays (eds) (2005), Photography and Literature
in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Derrida, J. and J.-F. Bonhomme (2010), Athens Still Remains, translated by P.-A.
Brault and M. Naas, New York: Fordham University Press.
Di Bello, P. et al. (eds) (2012), The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond,
London and New York: I.B. Tauris.
Fais, M. (1996), Ύστερο βλέμμα, Athens: Patakis.
Fais, M. (2002), Η πόλη στα γόνατα, Athens: Patakis.
Fais, M. (2012), Κτερίσματα, Athens: Patakis.
Gernsheim, H. (1948), Julia Margaret Cameron, London: The Fountain Press.
Gotsi, G. (2004), Η ζωή εν τη πρωτευούση: θέματα αστικής πεζογραφίας από το
τέλος του 19ου αιώνα, Athens: Nefeli.
Haworth-Booth, M. (1997), Photography: An Independent Art; Photographs from the
Victoria and Albert Museum 1839–1996, London: V&A Publications.
Hinton, B. (ed.) (2003), Illustrations by Julia Margaret Cameron of Alfred Lord

Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems, Isle of Wight: Julia Margaret
Cameron Trust.
Ίκαρος: Τα πενήντα πρώτα χρόνια (1993), Athens: Ikaros.
Ioannou, Y. (1980), ‘O Μπάτης’, in Για ένα φιλότιμο, Athens: Kedros, 52–4 (story
first published 1964).
Ioannou, Y. (1984), ‘Εις εαυτόν’, in Η πρωτεύουσα των προσφύγων, Athens:
Kedros, 208–78.
Ioannou, Y. and A. Belias (1987), Ομόνοια 1980, Athens: Kedros (first published
1980).
Iser, W. (1980), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Konstantinou, F. (ed.) (2006), Η φωτογράφος Βούλα Παπαϊωάννου, Athens: Agra.
Moschovi, A. (2002), ‘Η (αν)αποφασιστική στιγμή: η μετεξέλιξη της
φωτογραφίας-ντοκουμέντο στην Ελλάδα τη δεκαετία του ‘80’, in J. Stathatos
(ed.), 1o Συνέδριο για την Ιστορία της Ελληνικής Φωτογραφίας, Ελληνικές
Φωτογραφικές Μελέτες, Thessaloniki: Museum of Photography/Kythera
Photographic Encounters, 123–33.
Oikonomou, M. (2011), ‘Photos von nichtexistierended Orten. Bérards und
Boissonnas Album Odyseen’, in A. Hölter (ed.), Comparative Arts. Neue
Ansätze zu einer universellen Ästhetik, Heidelberg: Synchron, 143–52.
Oikonomou, M. (2013), ‘Athen, Derrida und seine Phototheorie’, in H.D. Blume
and C. Lienau (eds), Choregia. Münstersche Griechenland-Studien, Münster,
51–70.
Papargyriou, E. (2012), ‘Cavafy Strikes a Pose: Duane Michals’s Cavafy
Photobooks’, Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 3(2): 209–24.
Papargyriou, E. (2013), ‘Πέρα από το κείμενο: η φωτογραφία στη λογοτεχνία’,
Efimerida ton Syntakton (14–15 September): 32.
Parr, M. and G. Badger (2004), The Photobook: A History, 2 vols, London: Phaedon.
Rabb, J.M. (1995), Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840–1990,
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Robinson, C. (2001), ‘Yoryos Ioannou: Fragmentation in Life and Art’, Κάμπος.
Cambridge Papers in Modern Greek 9, 83–100.
Scott, C. (1999), The Spoken Image: Photography and Language, London: Reaktion.
Scott, C. (2007), Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson, London and
New York: I.B. Tauris.
Talbot, W.H.F. (2011), The Pencil of Nature, introduction by Colin Harding,
Chicago and London: KWS.
Triantafyllou, S. and P. Nikoltsos (2007), Los Angeles, Athens: Melani.
Valtinos, T. and J.-F. Bonhomme (2001), Σχισμή φωτός, Athens: Olkos.
Yiannitsiou, E. and G. Leivana (2000), Ελληνική βιβλιογραφία για τη φωτογραφία
(1893–1996), Athens: Elliniko Kentro Fotografias.

211
Part III
Photography as Propaganda
Photographic Matter-Realities:

10
Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor:
Arnold and Rosalind Toynbee’s Frames of the
Greco-Turkish War in Anatolia (1919–1922)
Georgios Giannakopoulos
If one sees a child growing up in vicious habits, it is –not always the child that one has to
blame; it is the parents or the school.
James Headlam-Morley to Lewis Namier, 12 February 1919
The archive
This chapter aims to offer an account of Arnold. J. Toynbee’s and, to a lesser

extent, Rosalind Toynbee’s testimonies of the Greco-Turkish war in Asia
Minor, by making use of some of the 160 unpublished photographs that are
part of Toynbee’s archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The motivation
for researching this photographic archive is twofold. On the one hand, the
archive illustrates Toynbee’s assessment of the Greco-Turkish war, which, in
turn, informed his understanding of nationalism and internationalism in the
aftermath of World War I. On the other hand, this research stems from an
ongoing reflection on recent discussions regarding the nature of historical
evidence in light of what has been termed the ‘visual turn’ in historical studies
(Campt and Tucker 2009: 3; Hunt and Schwartz 2010). In what follows,
I shall try to answer the following questions: how influential was the witnessing
of the Anatolian campaign for the development of Toynbee’s political and
historical thinking? How can we contextualise Toynbee’s neglected photographic
archive and treat it as something more than a mere documentation of
things past?
These questions will not be treated equally; what follows instead relies on a
reconstruction and contextualisation of Arnold and Rosalind Toynbee’s frames
of war. Thus, this chapter aims to offer an exposition of the largely ignored
213
visual imprints of Toynbee’s Near Eastern endeavours.1 The photographs are

located in a thin envelope in one of the seven boxes pertaining to the ‘Anatolian
War’, which comprise a small part of the voluminous Toynbee archive in the
Bodleian Library. The material on the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–22 includes
Arnold and Rosalind Toynbee’s general correspondence, Greek and Turkish
pamphlets, press cuttings, testimonies and papers relating to the documentation
of atrocities, reviews and writings linked with the preparation of Toynbee’s book
The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (Toynbee 1922).

The main body of the photographic archive depicts acts of violence,
deportations and evacuations related to the Toynbee’s engagement with
relief work throughout the spring and summer of 1921 in the Gemlic-Yalova
peninsula on the outskirts of Constantinople. There are also portraits of Greek
and Turkish soldiers as well as European officials, scenes of leisure and images
of travel on official and private occasions; these themes widely encompass
Toynbee’s experience in the Near East. To that end, the photographs make a
considerable contribution to the photographic archive of the Greco-Turkish war
in Asia Minor.2
The constitution of Toynbee’s photographic archive presents us with the
problem of ownership and authorship.The varying size and technical features of the
photographs make it impossible to establish the identity of all the photographers
involved. There seem to be at least four different groups of images. First, there is
a distinct group of 10 annotated photographs posted to Toynbee by Dr Maurice
Gehri, officer of the International Committee of the Red Cross. All of them
depict scenes of deportation and acts of violence, ranging from vague images of
smoke coming out of distant villages, to images of bodies covered in blood. These
pictures belong to a larger collection of 50 photographs taken by Gheri’s mission
in Anatolia, currently deposited with the International Committee of the Red
Cross historical archives in Geneva. They were probably used as evidence for the
report issued by the Red Cross on the Gemlic-Yalova atrocities following an
inter-allied enquiry (Gheri 1921; Rodogno 2011). Although the Toynbees had
no direct involvement in the writing of the Red Cross report, documenting these
atrocities occupied most of their time in Constantinople during the summer of
1921.
The archive also includes postcards and visual memorabilia of soldiers as well
as other acquaintances of the Toynbees during their stay in Anatolia. Among this
diverse collection, we encounter some of Toynbee’s Greek soldier-guides from the
1
For instance, in her recent account of Toynbee’s different encounters with ‘atrocity’ throughout
World War I and its aftermath, Rebecca Gill (2011) makes no reference to the visual aspect of his
activities.
2
There are, obviously, many sources of photographic depictions of the Greco-Turkish war in
Asia Minor both in Greece and Turkey. In the Greek (institutional) context, one would have to begin by
inquiring in The Centre for Asia Minor Studies, The War Museum in Athens and the Hellenic Literary
and Historical Archive.
Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor 215
time he spent with the Greek armed forces, postcards from high-ranking officers,
as well as depictions of Turkish officials. In a rare moment of war reporting, one
even finds depictions of Arnold Toynbee himself at the warfront, while embedded
with the Greek armed forces. Finally, there are scenes from the social life of the
Toynbees during their stay at Constantinople in the company of western friends
and acquaintances. Although the origin of a number of pictures remains unclear,
there is no doubt that the images refer back to crucial aspects of Arnold and, to a
lesser extent, Rosalind Toynbee’s political and social engagement in Anatolia. It is

thus evident that the camera and the photographic lens served various aims, ranging
from recording the ‘truth’ against nationalist propaganda, to depicting scenes of
amusement and leisure. This plurality of purpose manifests itself in the annotations
on the back of some of the photographs: the images bear signs – either single letters
or numbers – pointing to some sort of classification, most likely devised by Toynbee
himself. Their exact meaning, however, is impossible to retrieve.
While it remains unclear whether the Toynbees brought a camera of their own
with them to Anatolia, it is almost certain that Arnold Toynbee used the photographic
archive as a source for the writing of his controversial book (Toynbee 1922). This
provided a lasting interpretation of the Greco-Turkish conflict and articulated
a number of key assumptions regarding the nature of history. However, despite
Toynbee’s at times florid prose and vivid metaphors, the book did not feature any
illustrations, save for two maps: one of the overall region, and one of Toynbee’s own
travels. Given the lack of evidence pertaining to this decision, one might speculate
that Toynbee did not want to place a further strain in his already tainted relationship
with the Greek diaspora in London and the donors of the Koraes Chair after the stir
created by his documentation of the Greek atrocities (Clogg 1986).
Toynbee’s use of the archive points, one might argue, to a traditional
understanding of photographs as a source of documentation, whether they
allow the viewer to recall places and acquaintances, or provide important
documentation of acts of violence. In this account of Toynbee’s activities in
Anatolia, the photographs gain significance not as depictions of a time past,
but as archival traces of a historian’s preoccupations, and are framed accordingly.
This chapter aims at presenting the archive thematically with parallel references
to Rosalind Toynbee’s unpublished testimonies of the Greco-Turkish war in
Anatolia in order to construct a visual narrative. The ambition is not simply
to ‘look at’ the pictures and their annotations, but to ‘watch’ them as historical
objects conveying, in Peter Burke’s words, something of ‘the structure of thought
and representations of a certain time’ (Burke 2001: 11).3
The main thrust of the chapter will focus on Toynbee’s views of the Greco-
Turkish conflict juxtaposing, when possible, the domain of the visual with that
3
Maria Todorova (2009: 22) has drawn attention to what she has called ‘imagology’: an
interdisciplinary genre ‘dealing with the problem and representation of “otherness”’. Although many
years have passed from the publication of her Imagining the Balkans, there have not been many attempts
to deal with the material and visual aspect of the representations of otherness.
of the written text. It is thus structured around images that introduce us to the
journalist who has spent time with the Greek military forces and the agents of
humanitarian relief. The first section, by way of introduction, accounts for Toynbee’s
complex relationship with Greece and discusses key aspects of his early thinking by
referring to a juvenile photograph from Toynbee’s year abroad at the British School
in Athens. The remaining sections focus on Arnold’s and Rosalind’s depictions of
some of the military and humanitarian aspects of the Greco-Turkish conflict.
A wandering scholar
In one of his late autobiographical essays, Toynbee paid tribute to the decisive
influence of Greece on his intellectual development. He talked of ‘three Greek
educations’ that ran in parallel within the trajectory of his scholarly career. The
first influence upon him was prompted by the study of ancient Greece and the
exploration of the Greco-Roman world within the confined walls of the elite
public school of Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford in fin de siècle Britain.
The conclusion of his undergraduate studies signaled the advance of his ‘second
Greek education’, with the young scholar’s Wanderjahr in Greece and Italy. To
Toynbee’s mind, in Greece the glorious ancient past would merge with the odious
political present marking the beginning of his systematic involvement with
international politics. Reflecting retrospectively on his first experience in Greece,
Toynbee asserted:
I had come to Greece to learn there from inanimate nature […] about the dead and buried
Greek world that had become my spiritual home as a result of my humanist education in
England. But, incidentally to my pilgrimage to these dumb relics of Antiquity, I found myself
meeting living Greek men and women who were highly intelligent, alert and vocal. […] For
them Ancient Greece was not, as it had been for me at Winchester a city of refuge from which
one could keep the present day world at bay; it was an heirloom that had value for its possible
service in helping them to achieve their country’s present day national ambitions […] I had
come to Greece for the purpose of meeting not the present-day Greeks, but the relics of their
ancient predecessors. I was now meeting the present-day Greeks, and they’re giving me a
second Greek education. They were initiating me into the twentieth century world in which
I, too, willy-nilly was implicated (Toynbee 1969: 28–9).
Toynbee’s frequent excursions in mainland Greece, during the year of his stay
in Athens, earned him the reputation of the School’s most committed traveller.
His wanderings blended enquiries on the material remains of the ancient Greek
past with concerns about the political realities of Greece and the Balkans.4
4
The advent of institutions such as the British School in Rome and Athens facilitated this
merging of the past and present in numerous ways. They offered a hub for the rediscovery and the
placement of the ancient past on scientific foundations, through archaeological excavations and the
This dual concern was by no means Toynbee’s own peculiarity. For instance, a
year before Toynbee’s fellowship at the British school, A.E. Zimmern, his former
tutor at Oxford, had used his time in Greece to compile his influential survey of
fifth-century BC Athens (Zimmern 1915) and gather evidence for his ongoing
meditations on the psychological and sociological underpinnings of the idea
of nationality. In addition, the British School’s director Alan Wace, a trained
archaeologist, worked simultaneously on the Myceanean age, on Neolithic
pottery, on modern embroidery from the Greek islands and took an interest in
the anthropology of the nomadic Vlach pastoral community (Llewellyn Smith
et al. 2009: 67–77; Toynbee 1969: 22).
Toynbee’s wanderings in mainland Greece resembled Wace’s itineraries.
Both, in Toynbee’s account, were travelling like ‘Klepths’ carrying ‘a rucksack,
water-bottle, and raincoat, but nothing more’ (Toynbee 1969: 24). Their
‘Spartan’ attitude differed from the lavish style of the director of the British
School at Rome, Ashby, who carried all sorts of things with him including a
‘camera with an ample supply of heave slides’ (ibid.). Toynbee thought that the
application of the traveller’s imagination rendered the camera unwarranted.
This assertion did not, however, prevent him from posing for the documentation
of the School’s domestic life (Fig. 10.1). When each member of the School
was asked to pose in a series of staged photographs, Toynbee chose to be
surrounded by water flasks, maps, socks, cloths and notebooks – the essential
aids of a traveller whose distant and authoritative posture attested to his lofty
mission (Toynbee 1969: 20).
We are informed that this picture is in fact ‘part of a now undecipherable,
inside joke’, part of a series of images ‘for which students and officers of the
School posed in the same setting but surrounded by a different collection of
objects’ (Llewellyn Smith et al. 2009: 5). Toynbee’s inquisitive gaze evokes the
figure of the historian in quest of past historical sites, the wandering scholar
who would spend many hours in village coffee shops learning modern Greek
and discussing current affairs. It is also representative of the British traveller
of the time, who would employ the standard tropes of colonial vocabulary in
his intimate letters, including, in Toynbee’s case, descriptions of the Greek
‘dago’.5
collection of inscriptions. They opened up towards new sciences to the extent that archeological
practice accommodated more anthropological endeavours; they also provided a point of reference for
contemporary travellers and wanderers and played a political role in promoting their countries’ interest.
Cf. Llewellyn Smith et al. 2009.
5
The word ‘dago’, short for the Spanish first name ‘Diego’, had acquired a derogatory meaning
by the mid-nineteenth century and was chiefly used for Italians and Southern Europeans in the US, UK
and Australia. The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the term as ‘a name given somewhat
contemptuously to Spanish, Portuguese and Italian sailors’. On the racist and colonial underpinnings of
Toynbee’s understanding of modern Greece, cf. Clogg 2000, Chapter 2.
Figure 10.1 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee at the British School of

Athens c. 1911–12
Source: © British School at Athens Photographic Archive
Toynbee’s success in securing a fellowship in ancient history at Balliol

College, upon his return to Great Britain, marked the beginning of a promising
academic career. War in the Balkans prompted him to offer an account of
Modern Greek political life inaugurating, thus, his scholarly engagement
with international politics (Toynbee 1914; Toynbee 1915a). The subsequent
outbreak of the Great War disrupted Toynbee’s academic preoccupations and
turned him towards the study of the question of nationality as the basis of
a future European settlement (Toynbee 1915c, 1915b).6 Toynbee’s successful

attempt to avoid military service allowed him to move to London and offer his
assistance to wartime propaganda: as an expert adviser to a special commission
entrusted with the work of documenting atrocities and war crimes committed
by the Germans in Belgium and by the Ottomans against Armenians (McNeill
1990: 68; Toynbee 1917a; Toynbee 1917b; Toynbee 1917c; Toynbee 1917c).
Such publications were an integral part of Britain’s propaganda efforts
directed at neutral countries, as well as the Ottoman east and, most
importantly, the diaspora communities in the United States.7 Demonstrating
the demoralisation of German soldiers and the ‘murderous tyranny of the
Turks’, the propaganda sought to project an image of Britain as ‘the natural
protector of small oppressed nations and the guarantor of national self-
determination’, with particular reference to the Armenian, Jewish and Arab
communities (Renton 2007: 647). Thus, the ‘Near East’ was depicted as
‘a landscape of oppressed nations’, whose origins could be traced back to the
Orientalist and Biblical literature of the ancient East. Evidently, in the words
of a historian of the British involvement in the Middle East, ‘nationalism, as
per thinking of the time was the redemptive force that was to take Western
Asia back toward civilisation’ (Renton 2007: 653). This attempt to create a
version of ‘Asiatic Balkans’, as it was referred to in the British press (Renton
2007: 666), relied on both the contribution of archaeologists and learned men
with expert knowledge of the calibre of Martin Sykes and T.E. Lawrence and
on the use of different kinds of visual imprints as instruments of propaganda.8
6
Writing on Nationality and the War, Toynbee tried to think through the question of nationality
in scientific terms. Deeply influenced by the psychological theories of Tarde and Bergson, he understood
nationality as a ‘subjective psychological feeling’ at once elective and predetermined (Sluga 2006: 43).
Toynbee’s vision of international order was largely based on the application of the principle of national
self-determination, albeit in an evolutionary framework. His juvenile internationalism envisaged, in
Sluga’s words, ‘a prototypical League of Nations […] modeled on the federalism of the United States,
comprising of psychologically “mature” nations that could survive the psychological progress of the
“backward countries” into nations’ (ibid. 43).
7
On the question of British wartime propaganda, see Messinger 1992; Gregory 2008; Monger
2012.
8
A few years later, at the Paris Peace Conference, Eleftherios Venizelos chose to start making
his case for the territorial claims of Greece with a photograph of a sponge fisherman. The picture was
put forward as evidence of the Greek historical and cultural rights in the region.
At the same time, publications of ‘historical records’ of the German atrocities

in Belgium were replete with photographic depictions of destroyed houses,
bombarded churches and hospitals. The written word, in the form of detailed
first-hand accounts of murders and catastrophes, was complemented by images
of empty streets, destitution and ruins (Toynbee 1917a; Toynbee 1917c).
As the war progressed and British propaganda evolved, Toynbee found his
place in the infamous Political Intelligence Department working as an expert
on the affairs of the Ottoman East.9 In this capacity, he participated in the Paris
Peace Conference as one of the many experts of the British delegation. During
his short stay in Paris, Toynbee welcomed the news of his appointment as
the first Koraes professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, a position
to which he had, somewhat ambivalently, applied after the encouragement
and sponsorship of his father-in-law, the leading classicist Gilbert Murray.10
Toynbee’s Philhellenic reputation and his extraordinary cognizance of the
Hellenic world had appealed to the electors of the Chair, which was largely
subsidised by the Greek state and the diaspora community of London (Clogg
1986).
The title of Toynbee’s inaugural lecture, delivered in the presence of the
Greek premier Venizelos, was indicative of the young historian’s ambitions: ‘The
place of mediaeval and modern Greece in history’. Despite his disenchantment
with regard to the descent of the Greek ‘race’ and the role of Byzantium in
world history, Toynbee’s verdict upon contemporary Greece pointed to the
role of the Greek state as a ‘land bridge’ between Europe and the Middle East
and reserved for Greek statesmen the role of administrators in the interaction
between different civilisations in Asia Minor (Clogg 1986: 44; Cowling 1980:
22–9). At the same time, Toynbee was fully aware of the challenges and the
ultimate impossibility of the Greek occupation of Smyrna.11 This did not by any
means deter him from travelling to Asia Minor to examine how the Greeks were
managing their temporary mandate in the occupation zone of Asia Minor.
9
On the Political Intelligence Department, see Goldstein 1988 and Sharp 1988.
10
Writing to his friend Robert Shelby Darbishire from Paris on 21 July 1919, Toynbee
confided a sense of ‘mania’, a feeling of uprootedness and bewilderment that led him to a ‘dislike of
the professorship’. The letter makes clear that at the time he was waiting to hear from another offer,
although the nature of the offer is not clear (Peper 1987: 7).
11
Among the tasks he undertook was the drafting of a plan for ‘European Turkey’ and Smyrna
together with Harold Nicolson. Their plan acknowledged both the strategic unsustainability of a
Greek occupation of Smyrna and the risk of Venizelos’s electoral failure if Greek claims were to be
denied. They professed to ‘cut the Gordian knot’ by giving the Greeks European Turkey only and
internationalising the Straits. Nicolson added that ‘such a solution would at least have the merit of
finality. All other solutions would entail trouble in the future’ (Nicolson 1945: 312). One month later
the Greek army landed in Smyrna.
Frames of war (I): an embedded journalist
Toynbee’s journey in the Near East reflects many of the intertwined trajectories
of his career: an academic ‘philhellene’ studying history in the making; a historian
looking for the proper foundation of a theory of history; a British scholar in public
service; a firm internationalist with a belief in the prospects of the League of
Nations; a freelance journalist for the liberal Manchester Guardian seeking a fair
and balanced representation of the facts. His practical considerations were balanced
by a theoretical enquiry into the foundations of history through a comparative
empirical study of the Eastern and Western European civilisations, in line with his
academic affiliation with King’s College London. His journey, reconstructed from
his book on the Western Question, his diary, letters and dispatches may be divided,
broadly speaking, into different phases. First, what might be labelled the Greek
‘point of view’: his writings from Athens on the turbulent political affairs shortly
after the electoral triumph of the anti-Venizelist camp in the November 1920
elections; his observations from the Smyrna region with regard to the cultural and
administrative achievements of the Greek administration; his writings from the
warfront while embedded with the Greek army in early spring 1921.
The second phase of Toynbee’s journey may be loosely called the Turkish ‘point
of view’. Joined by his wife Rosalind in Istanbul in the spring of 1921, Toynbee
spent most of his remaining time documenting atrocities and attempting to build
contacts with Turkish nationalists; his commentary on the fortunes of the war was
increasingly perceived as ‘anti-Greek’. Thirdly, shortly before leaving for Britain via
Istanbul on 16 September 1921, Toynbee revisited Smyrna and wandered through
parts of mainland Greece, but this time his enquiries were met with widespread
suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Toynbee’s first articles in the Manchester Guardian focused on the turbulent
political situation in Greece after Venizelos’s defeat in the election of 1 November
1920 and conveyed his deep anxiety about the future of the Anatolian campaign.
With these concerns in mind, Toynbee boarded the SS Ismini on 26 January 1921
and sailed to Smyrna, the first place east of Greece he ever set foot in. The Smyrna
he viewed would bring to mind Toynbee’s earlier images of Piraeus: disorder, chaos,
an unruly mob and a town in bad shape, badly lit, with a host of noisy coffee shops.
Smyrna had a strange character, different from any other Greek city, which would
make him cry out: ‘My God, the contrast between this and Athens is an advertisement
for the Greeks or in any case for the success in taking the western inoculation. […]
But, Toynbee added, ‘I mustn’t let myself be a Philhellene, for they are taking me up
with a vengeance – [they] sent an officer on board to meet me…’.12
Toynbee spent his first couple of months in the region of Smyrna in the
company of officers and other Greek officials and he was frequently escorted
by Greek soldiers enjoying a status very similar to what one might today call
‘embedded journalism’ (Fig. 10.2).
12
Toynbee Papers, Box 53, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Figure 10.2 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee in Usak, 4 February 1921.

Toynbee received the photographs from captain Dimotakis, his
military escort
Source: Toynbee Papers, Bodleian Library Oxford
His commentary for the Manchester Guardian addressed the problem of what he
took to be the ‘colonisation’ of Smyrna and the tensions rising from the forceful
re-emergence of the Greeks, that brought dissonance in the otherwise harmonious
co-habitation between the Franco-Levantine merchants and the ‘Turkish peasant’.13
While acknowledging the dangers the Greeks brought to the cosmopolitan setting
of Smyrna, Toynbee’s internationalism prompted him to advocate an enlightened
administration, which would effectively resolve the ethnic tensions, turning
Smyrna into a workable political unit. To that end, the Greek administration of
Smyrna seemed adequate for this task.
From the ‘advanced outposts’ of the once thriving Greco-Roman civilisation,
Toynbee did not fail to note the unique bonds of nature (the layout of the landscape
and the natural environment) and culture (the characteristic idiosyncrasies of the
local populations). The heights of Anatolia, beyond Eski Sehir, were the furthermost
‘natural limit’ of two cultural matrixes: a mysterious hyper-historical eastern ‘force’
and the west. These reflections and many other quasi-anthropological observations
13
‘The Smyrna Problem: Views of the Western European Colony’, Manchester Guardian, 28.02.1921.
Figure 10.3 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee in Usak, 4 February 1921.

Toynbee received the photographs from captain Dimotakis, his
military escort
about the virtuous character of the Greek Venizelist officers and the aspirations of
the various Greek, Turkish and Levantine inhabitants were obviously informed by
Toynbee’s expeditions in the interior of the Smyrna zone of occupation (Fig. 10.3).
The commanding officer of the second and third division, General Vlachopoulos,
an ‘olding man with [a] little beard under his chin’, was a gentle ‘philosopher’ – a ‘type
Anglais’.14 His and other neighbouring units were disciplined and well organised,
thanks to their contact with the British in the Macedonian warfront and to their
common fight against the Bolsheviks.15 Their manners were strikingly non-Greek:
They talk all kind of politics (not only their own party politics), read books (not only French
novels), are interested in the economics of this country, in the Turkish peasantry and in the
Byzantine and Ancient remains – in fact, I have enjoyed staying with them more than seeing
the country – and that is saying a great deal.16
14
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
Figure 10.4 Unknown photographer, Muslim women and children waiting to

be evacuated at a quay somewhere in the Gemlik peninsula,
c. May–July 1921
Toynbee was quick to notice the danger of becoming a ‘Venizelist’. ‘What is worse’,
he wrote, is that ‘I seem to believe that an Englishman is a good sort of thing to be’.
Toynbee clearly did not fit in the military unit. His trajectory could not
have been more different from that of T.E. Lawrence, whose reputation as
‘Lawrence of Arabia’ is still a reminder of British imperial complicity and
complacency. In fact, Toynbee had crossed paths with Lawrence at Oxford,
but the two men followed very different directions: Toynbee chose the Greco-
Roman world, while Lawrence’s adventurous spirit brought him to D.G.
Hogarth’s excavations in Arab lands. Both, however, shared a passion for
international politics – a feature common among many young learned men of
their generation who aspired to represent different peoples and cultures.
Toynbee’s staged encounters with the Greek military personnel and
the Greek inhabitants of the villages in the zone of occupation was at first
‘tremendous fun’, but it also made clear to him his own sense of responsibility.
A few days after his journey to Usak, in yet another village, Toynbee received
‘the greatest reception’ he had hitherto been offered:
I motored over [...] to a town called Kula to the north, with 3 or 4 thousand Greeks and they
had got it into their heads that I was a sort of emanation of M.G. [Manchester Guardian].
When we got within about ¼ of a mile we saw crowds coming out with union jacks and
Greek flags and I was marched through the town with a procession of school children behind
me, the priest on one side, the chief merchant on the other and everyone shouting «Ζήτω η
Αγγλία» [Long Live England]. They had hung carpets all along the road (it is one of the chief
places where they make them) and I was taken to the school where I held a sort of a state
reception.17
Unfortunately, no such picture survives in Toynbee’s archive. The only material

from this time, the depictions of Toynbee’s visit to Usak and the regiments of the
second division holding the south-eastern front, was taken by one of his military
escorts, captain Dimotakis, and conveys a strange, almost uncanny feeling of
non-belonging (Fig. 10.3). The second frame (Fig. 10.2), which, judging from the
angle, must have been taken by someone on horseback, confronts the viewer with
an odd type of mobility; it is as if Toynbee is racing towards the lens. Surrounded
by soldiers in both cases, Toynbee stages himself photographically as a soldier
too; only his watchful capacity singles out Toynbee from his companions – he
remains the lone observer.
As his visits continued, Toynbee would very soon face the horrors of war. The
immediacy of this experience surpassed his previous knowledge of documenting
and inspecting countless photographs and testimonies of the atrocities on
both fronts of the Great War. Reflecting on his experience in the battlefield,
he unwillingly alluded to what Eduardo Cadava calls the ‘enigmatic relation
between death and survival, loss and life, destruction and preservation, mourning
and memory’ (Cadava 2001: 35). Confronted with the reality of war, Toynbee
gradually became aware of what the photographic image of ruin and devastation
bears witness to:
[…] a dead man is a dead man, and they are not nice to see. The sudden fixation of a violent
movement, like an instantaneous photograph, is very dreadful – the only mercy is that they
look so inhuman that you think of them as something like waxworks and forget that they had
been men two days ago. There is something sinister, too, about the place where this is going
on so that in a day or two you get to hate the hills and valleys […] What a wonderful man
Tolstoy is - that account in War and Peace of the sensation in getting in touch with the enemy
is just what one felt, though I only remembered it now that I am writing. The sinisterness and
the fascination certainly increase into the same ratio when you get near to the place when the
obscenity is going on [...].18
The parallel effect of the ‘sudden fixation’ of a violent movement to that of an

‘instantaneous photograph’ displays a profound understanding of the photographic
17
18
Toynbee Papers, ibid.
snapshot. Toynbee compares the mechanics of war to the photographer, fixing an

expression of pain and agony on to the dead man’s features. To him, the inhumanity
of death removed all life from the human face, reducing it to a senseless mask.
However, it is precisely the agony, the inhumanity of the face petrified even until its
last convulsion that eventually detaches Toynbee from the photograph once more.
He sees these men as wax effigies, as corpses ceasing to be human. The ‘mercy’ he
invokes applies not to the victims of war, but to the spectator who is spared the agony,
believing that these images no longer really depict human beings. Such reflections are
likely to have informed his own collection of photographs of atrocities: they remain
devoid of feeling and are to be scrutinised from the distance of the historian’s lens.
The military horror in Anatolia was different from the atrocities in the
Western front of the Great War in that the conflict was seen as deriving from
centuries of ‘abnormal social development’ and could be ‘cured’ only through the
coordinated intervention of the Great Powers.19 Toynbee’s first-hand view of the
military stalemate led to his realisation of what a potential victory of the Turkish
national movement would mean. Toynbee’s political commentary stressed the fact
that the Smyrna Zone was an ‘unworkable unit’ both from an economic and an
administrative perspective. Instead, he proposed a confinement of the occupation
zone to the frontiers of the former Vilayet of Aidin and the formation of a mixed,
proportional administration under the political guidance of the Great Powers
together with the non-Greek and non-Turkish populations of the region. The
model for this idea was the pre-war Vilayet of Lebanon.20
Frames of war (II): agents of humanitarianism
Istanbul was the point of departure for another, more personal ‘war’ that the
Toynbees found themselves waging: one against the ‘atrocities’ perpetrated by the
Greek army and other irregular forces on the South Kios (Gemlik-Yalova) peninsula
(Fig. 10.4). In the spring/summer of 1921 the Toynbees would become the voice
of the slaughtered, suppressed and expelled that seemed to have jumped out of
books, like those which Arnold Toynbee had composed, with particular care during
the Great War, to the point of mental exhaustion. The victims, however, were no
longer Christian populations caught in the web of the ‘blood thirsty’ and ‘barbaric’
Turk. This brought the reversal of a very powerful topos, upon which rested the
presumption for the superiority of the European civilisation in the long nineteenth
century (Rodogno 2012: 12).
19
‘[The] true diagnosis of the atrocities might be that they were a prolonged epidemic to which
the Near and Middle Eastern Societies were subject from the time when they lost their indigenous
civilisations until they became acclimatised to the intrusive influences of the West’ Toynbee 1922:
267 and Gill 2011:182. See also Toynbee papers and ‘The Greek front after the battle: a visit to the
third division’, Manchester Guardian, 27.05.21.
20
‘The Turk at home’, Manchester Guardian, 12.04.21.
The atrocities in the Gemlik peninsula were not unprecedented in the

broader Anatolian front, especially after the landing of the Greek army.
Turkish populations had also facilitated the formation of bandit groups,
similar to the ‘comitajis’, caught in a web of mutually destructive ethnic
violence. With regard to this strategically important side of the front, the
Greek authorities facilitated the formation of paramilitary groups and bandits
operating in the Turkish villages. Looting, rapes and other atrocities intensified
over the months following the gradual escalation of the conflict to a total war
of systematic destruction (Toynbee 1922: 283–341; Llewellyn Smith 1999:
373–5; Kostopoulos 2007).
In Toynbee’s commentary, which was bound to cause a stir amongst both
the Greek community of London and the Greek authorities, the ‘civilising
mission’ of the Greek administration was depicted as devoid of any moral or
political legitimation.21 He believed that such ‘brutal’ activities were awakening
‘the subconscious of the primeval animal’ in persecutors and persecuted alike,
making them appear one and the same. The Great powers had a moral duty to
prevent ‘the transfusion of this racial war in the Middle East’.22
In a series of letters addressed to her family and especially to her father
Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and one of the figureheads
of the League of Nations movement in Britain, Rosalind Toynbee described an
almost impossible reality in a highly symbolic language of colonial detachment:
All Christian populations, Greeks and Armenians alike, had somehow become
anti-human. They had ghastly bestial faces as though they had been drinking blood; the
whole crowd often seemed demoniac. It was something that Conrad would describe better
than anyone else - as though all men were gradually changing back into wild beasts, only
not clean untamed wild beasts but beasts that were obscene and unnatural, and beyond
belief.23
Rosalind Toynbee’s testimonies inadvertently employ themes from the

Christian iconography of suffering and bring to life scenes from her romance
novels.24 When referring to Muslim women, who were forced to wait for days on
21
‘Greek Massacre of Moslems’, Manchester Guardian, 27.05.21, ‘The Greek atrocities at Yalova’,
Manchester Guardian, 10.06.21, ‘Greek atrocities at Yalova’, ibid., 13.06.21, ‘Greek atrocities’. Ibid.,
14.06.21, ‘How Constantinople is “Controlled”’, Manchester Guardian, 01.07.21, ‘The Greek retirement
and the atrocities’ Manchester Guardian, 21.07. 21, ‘The Greeks in Asia Minor’, Manchester Guardian,
16.07.21, ‘The Greek censorship and Eastern Thrace’, Manchester Guardian, 19.07.21.
22
23
24
Rosalind Toynbee, née Murray made her debut in the Edwardian literary scene with her
Leading Note in 1910. By the time of her conversion to Catholicism in the late 1930s, she had published
five novels in total. In the 1940s and early 1950s she composed a series of religious tracts negotiating
her conversion to Catholicism.
the quays to be evacuated, she describes them as ‘Italian Madonnas’ with their
‘long blue draperies and white veils round their faces’ (Fig. 10.4). The dramatic
climax of this scene invokes the ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, a ‘rocky promontory
jutting out into the sea’ bearing on its highest point a weary, faceless picture
of the Madonna painted on a rock, in which Carola, the heroine of Rosalind
Murray’s The Leading Note (1910), took refuge to lament the departure of her
‘eastern’ Russian lover. More than a decade later, ‘the Madonna on the Rocks’
found her true face in the plight of the uprooted Muslim women. This strange
inversion – the Christians turn into blood-thirsty barbarians, while the Muslims
ascend into divinity – explains Rosalind’s missionary zeal in forensically exposing
the misconduct of the Greek forces.
Among the many photographs concerning the Gemlik-Yalova atrocities
there is one particular frame which exemplifies the (de)contextualising
tendencies of the photographic act. To paraphrase Susan Sontag: ‘alter the
caption and the children’s [mutilations] could be used and reused’ (Sontag
2003: 9). Acknowledging that the caption is needed for a photograph to make
sense as a historical document, one must also be aware of the many different
frames on which a photograph may be operating (Fig. 10.5).25 The depiction of
a mutilated child looking straight into the camera, demanding her truth be told
has a timeless quality. This figure may serve as an illustration of all the suffering
that needs to be publicised, although it should be noted, as Judith Butler has
put it in another context, that ‘even the most transparent of documentary
images is framed, and framed for a purpose, carrying that purpose within its
frame and implementing it through the frame’ (Butler 2009: 70).
For the historian, who aims at documenting what has happened, and
the humanitarian, who provides relief, the caption offers much-needed
contextualisation, as it is around the caption that the meaning of the photograph
is developed. Or, as Sontag would have it, ‘while the image is an invitation to
look, the caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just
that’ (Sontag 2003: 40). Rosalind Toynbee meticulously noted that this was the
depiction of ‘a little girl from one of the burned inland villages whose whole
lower jaw has been blown off by a bomb. Armenian “Chettis” did her village;
descended on it during the day – they threw three bombs at them. The child’s
mother was killed, her own jaw blown off, twenty people killed’.26 Thus, framed
accordingly, the girl’s gaze serves as a testament to the unwarranted killing of her
family and becomes a call for justice (Fig. 10.5).
For the remainder of the summer of 1921, the Toynbees participated in
a full-scale ‘humanitarian mission’, which was followed by an allied Inquiry.
They participated in more than five missions of the Red Crescent on board of
the Gul-i-Nihal offering relief, coordinating evacuation attempts, searching for
suffering populations, taking testimonies from witnesses, gathering names of
25
Cf. Azoulay 2008: 20–23.
26
Toynbee Papers, Box 53, ibid.
Figure 10.5 Unknown photographer, Child from Pazarkeni mutilated by bomb

thrown into house by Armenian Chettis, c. May–July 1921
the missing, as well as recording personal stories and narratives of atrocities.

Toynbee’s earlier aim to observe the treatment of minorities in Asia Minor
had turned into a fully-fledged humanitarian mission. The ruins of the ravaged
villages were further disconnected from the remnants of a glorious past;
they were, rather, the remains of an odious present. History was no longer
understood as ‘the study of scenery or sites’ but, rather, as ‘an insight into people’s
character’.27
27
Conclusion: the missing photographs
Other than relief work, the Toynbees spent the summer of 1921 in Istanbul
among their western friends, strengthening their newly established relations
with merchants and members of the ruling class of what would soon become
the Turkish nation-state. Arnold wished to monitor the ways in which ‘the
European governors of eastern lands’ treated ‘the educated natives’.28 At the
same time, he became increasingly critical of British foreign policy and argued
for a new rapprochement with France, which would bring peace and secure the
interests of both countries in the changing landscape of the Near and Middle
East.
After leaving Istanbul in September 1921, on his way to Italy, somewhere
in Bulgaria, Toynbee experienced an apocalyptic vision of his theory of history,
which was first and foremost to be a history of civilisations. This was one
of the many apocalyptic visions of Toynbee, the prophet. From the hills of
Constantinople to the battlefields of Anatolia and from the villages of the
Smyrna region to the Gemlik-Yalova atrocities, Toynbee’s intuitive vision
stripped the landscape of its materiality transforming it to a site for the
re-enactment of past historical dramas. And the source of light was in the
‘West’, for it was the West casting its shadow over the rest of the world. Yet
the national ‘awakening’ of the non-western world marked the gradual erosion
of the civilisation in the West:
The non-Western societies are oppressed by our chilly shadow, while we are resentful when
they assert their individuality. This is partly what arouses our animus against the Turks and
the Russians. They do not fit into our Western scheme, and so it bothers us to be reminded
of their existence. At the same time, our lack of interest in them … is probably a sign of
well-being in our own society. So long as a civilisation is fulfilling its potentialities and
developing in accordance with its genius, it is a universe in itself. Impressions from outside
distract it without bringing it inspiration, and it therefore excludes them as far as possible
from its consciousness. But no civilisation has yet found the secret of eternal youth, still less
of immortality.29
References
Azoulay, A. (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography, London: Verso.

Burke, P. (2001), Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Documents, Ithaca:
Butler, J. (2009), Frames of War: When Life is Grievable?, London: Verso.
Cadava, E. (2001), ‘Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins’, October 96: 35–60.
28
29
Toynbee 1922: 362–3.
Campt, T. and J. Tucker (eds), ‘Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography

in Historical Inquiry’, History and Theory 48: 1–8.
Clogg, R. (1986), Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair,
London: Frank Cass.
Clogg, R. (2000), Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Cowling, M. (1980), Religion and Public Doctrine in England, vol. I, Cambridge:

Gheri, M. (1921), ‘Mission D’ Enquête En Anatolie (12–22 Mai 1921)’, Revue
Internationale de la Croix Rouge 31: 721–35.
Gill, R. (2011), ‘“Now I have seen evil and I cannot be silent about it”: Arnold J.
Toynbee and his encounters with atrocity 1915–1923’, in T. Crook, R. Gill and
B. Taithe (eds), Evil, Barbarism and Empire. Britain and Abroad c. 1830–2000,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 172–200.
Goldstein, E. (1988), ‘The Foreign Office and Political Intelligence 1918–1920’,
Review of International Studies 14: 275–88.
Gregory, A. (2008), The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kostopoulos, T. (2007), Πόλεμος και εθνοκάθαρση, Athens: Vivliorama.
Llewellyn Smith, M.L. (1999), Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, Michigan:
University of Michigan Press.
Llewellyn Smith, M., P.M. Kitromilides and E. Calligas (eds) (2009), Scholars,
Travels, Archives: Greek History and Culture through the British School at Athens,
British School at Athens Studies, Athens: British School at Athens.
McNeill, W.H. (1989), Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mesinger, G. (1992), British Propaganda and the State in the First World War,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Monger, D. (2012), Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The
National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale, Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.
Murray, R. (1910), The Leading Note, London: Sidgwick and Jackson.
Nicolson, H. (1945), Peacekeeping 1919, London: Constable.
Peper, C.B. (1987), An Historian’s Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee
and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Renton, J. (2007), ‘Changing Languages of Empire and the Orient: Britain and
the Invention of the Middle East: 1917–1918’, The Historical Journal 50(3):
645–67.
Rodogno, D. (2011), ‘L’enquête Du Délégué Du Cicr Qui Déjoua Un Mesonge
Historique ‘, La Cité 4 (28 Octobre–12 Novembre).
Rodogno, D. (2012), Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman
Empire, 1815–1914: The Emergence of a European Concept and International
Practice, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Schwartz, V.R. and L. Hunt (2010), ‘Capturing the Moment: Images and
Eyewitnessing in History’, Journal of Visual Culture 9(3): 259–71.
Sharp A. (1988), ‘Some Relevant Historians: The Political Intelligence
Departments of the Foreign Office, 1918–1920’, Australian Journal of Politics
and History 34(3): 359–68.
Sluga, G. (2006), The Nation, Psychology and International Politics, London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sontag, S. (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin.

Todorova, M. (2009), Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Toynbee, A.J. (1914), Greek Policy since 1882, London: Oxford University Press.
Toynbee, A.J. (1915a), ‘Greece’, in D. Hogarth, A.J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany and R.W.
Seton-Watson, The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania,
Turkey, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Toynbee, A.J.(1915b), Nationality and the War, London: J.M. Dent
Toynbee, A.J. (1915c), The New Europe: Some Essays in Reconstruction, London:
J.M. Dent.
Toynbee, A.J. (1917a), The German Terror in France, New York: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Toynbee, A.J. (1917b), The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks, New York: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Toynbee, A.J. (1917c), The German Terror in Belgium: An Historical Record, New
York: George H. Doran Company.
Toynbee, A.J. (1922), The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the
Contact of Civilizations, London: Constable.
Toynbee, A.J. (1969), Experiences, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmern, A.E. (1915), The Greek Commonweath: Politics and Economics in Fifth-
Century Athens, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
11
Nelly’s Iconography of Greece1

Katerina Zacharia
In this chapter I examine Nelly’s photographs within the framework of visual culture
studies and heritage studies. My work also draws on classical reception, and on my
research on the role of classical antiquity in early state-funded tourist publications
(see Zacharia 2014). I concentrate on the photographs Nelly produced during her
Greek sojourn from 1924 to 1939. During the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–41),
the official discourse exerted propagandist control, especially through the Under-
Secretariat of Press and Tourism, which deliberately reproduced the nationalist
myth of Greece’s exceptionalism and the attendant superiority of the Greek race,
while aiming to construct the modern Greeks as undisputed direct descendants of
the ancients, and caretakers of the ancient Greek heritage. I am interested in the
tension between the makers and subjects of Greek heritage formation. I explore
Nelly as both the photographer-agent who contributes to national iconography,
but also as the product of the contemporary discourse. Furthermore, I examine
different historical moments of Nelly’s long life and career, focusing in particular
on her photographic output during the authoritarian Metaxas regime and its
recycling during the Axis occupation, her ‘rediscovery’ during the restoration of
democracy (metapolitefsi, post the 1967–74 military junta), and her celebration
in the 1980s as Greece’s par excellence national photographer. I argue that Nelly’s
interwar photographs present a unique case when the political and historical
context of nationalist iconography is de-emphasised or downright obliterated and
the maker’s relationship to the regime it served is occluded or underplayed, so that
her photographic genius may be indisputably exalted. This is very much unlike
1
My research was facilitated by a research grant by the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts of
Loyola Marymount University (Summer 2010), a research fellowship from the Initiative for Heritage
Conservancy (Fall 2010), and a Foreign Research Fellowship by the Alexander S. Onassis Public
Benefit Foundation (Spring 2011). I am grateful to all three institutions for their support. My special
thanks go to the curators of the Benaki Museum photographic archive for their assistance with Nelly’s
photographic collection, and to Nikos Paissios for his enthusiastic support and unending provision of
rare archival materials on Nelly. I am indebted to the Moretis family for granting me exclusive access
to their private archives.
233
the fate of Leni Riefenstahl who was promptly anathematised, and her output
was forever stigmatised as paradigmatic fascist art. On the contrary, a number of
Nelly’s photographs produced for the regime propaganda publications remain to
this day unpublished in museum archives. This chapter aims to unearth some of
these ‘forgotten’ archives and narrate their untold story.
Nelly (1899–1998) opened her atelier in Athens (on 18 Ermou Street) in
January 1925, after studying photography in Dresden (1921–24), first under Hugo
Erfurth (classical photography; traditional studio portrait), and later under Franz
Fiedler (modern approach and techniques; nudes; abstract compositions). Born
and raised in Aydin in Asia Minor into a wealthy merchant family, she moved to
Dresden after the destruction of her hometown in June 1919, while her family
settled in Smyrna, only to be uprooted again in the 1922 expulsion of the Greek-
Orthodox population of Anatolia following the tragic destruction of Smyrna.
Nelly experienced the artistic life of Dresden, one of the most avant-garde cities
in Europe, where expressionism in art (Die Brücke) and dance (Mary Wigman’s
Central School) flourished; indeed, she experimented with expressionism in some
early photographs of dancers (Nelly 1997). Despite adverse criticism for her nude
photos of dancer Mona Paiva at the Parthenon,2 she photographed the semi-nude
Hungarian dancer Nikolska again at the Parthenon in 1930,3 this time with greater
success. In Athens, she soon became a popular photographer with the bourgeoisie,
taking portraits of many well-known personalities from the worlds of politics,
letters, and the arts. And in 1930, she exhibited her photographs of Plaka and ‘Old
Athens.’ Nelly’s success soon allowed her to move to a more spacious atelier on
21 Ermou Street.
Having photographed the Delphic Festival in 1927, Nelly became the official
photographer for the Angelos Sikelianos/Eva Palmer second Delphic festival in
1930,4 due to her acquaintance with author Penelope Delta and the sponsorship of
the festival by the Benakis family. Penelope Delta was the daughter of Emmanouil
Benakis, a wealthy merchant from Alexandria in Egypt, who had served as Minister
of Agriculture and Industry for the first Venizelos government, and was elected
mayor of Athens in 1914. In a letter dated 28 December 1929, Delta commissions
Nelly for her portrait, and mentions the purchase of three of Nelly’s photographs
of ‘Old Athens’ and her wish to purchase a fourth one.5 Nelly’s photographs also
gained some recognition with the State’s early tourism initiatives. In 1929, the first
2
Paiva’s photographs were facilitated by Filadelfefs and were actually taken on 18 October
1925 (Karali 2013: 60ff.), not in 1927, as she reported in her autobiography, where she quotes in full
Pavlos Nirvanas’s forceful defence in the Estia newspaper (Nelly 1989: 103–4) on 24 October 1925. On
contemporary reactions to Nelly’s photos on the Acropolis, see Yalouri (2001: 160–62).
3
Not in 1929, as Nelly reported; see Karali 2013: 67 n. 25, and pp. 85–8 for more on Nikolska.
4
See Damaskos on the turn the ‘romantic ancestor worship’ took in Nelly’s Delphic photographs
(2008: 327).
5
Delta, furthermore, offers one of her contacts to advise Nelly on tax issues, and in a postscript
refers to a book of Boissonnas’s photographs she wishes to show her. Nelly had met Boissonnas in 1927
Nelly’s iconography of Greece 235
dated Greek Tourist poster appears, featuring Nelly’s photograph of the Parthenon
(Greek Tourist Poster 2007: 13). And in 1933, three photographs by Nelly’s were
featured in La Grèce actuelle, the first ‘official, statistical work on Greece’ (Miller
1934), a publication of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs begun during Venizelos’
last premiership; all three photos portray women in traditional dress in staged
postures and gestures typical of Nelly’s classical aesthetics.6
The dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who had seized power on 4 August 1936,
suspended the Tourist Organisation that had been instituted by Venizelos in

1929. He established his propaganda Under-Secretariat of Press and Tourism,
governed by his confidant, Under-Secretary of State, Theologos Nikoloudis, who
commissioned Nelly ‘to give a visual content to the concept “Greece”’ (Boudouri
1998: 97). Nelly photographically illustrated the first state-sponsored tourist
publication, and many of her pictures were reproduced in the regime’s youth
magazine, Neolaia (Mahaira 1987). I will focus on Nelly’s photos printed in the
tri-monthly tourist periodicals In Greece/En Grèce/In Griechenland (seven issues
from Spring 1937 to Winter 1939; and, one post-WWII issue in Autumn 1948), in
the fashion magazine La Mode Grecque (four issues from Summer 1938 to Summer
1940), in the weekly Neolaia (1938–41), and in the photographic collages that
served as backdrop for the material exhibits in the New York 1939 World’s Fair
Greek pavilion. In addition, I draw on relevant photographs from the collection
Nelly personally donated to the Benaki Museum in 1985.7 There are also relevant
materials in the collection of Dimitris and Alexandra Moretis, the architects who
designed the Greek pavilion for the New York 1939 World Fair.8 I supplement
my findings with printed and audio-visual materials on Nelly’s life and career
to suggest the influences on her work and to explore her collaboration with the
Metaxas regime, quoting often from her autobiography published in 1989 and
from the large photo-album published in 1990 by the Agricultural Bank, edited
by the costume and set designer Dionysis Fotopoulos.9 Finally, I draw on the
during his visit to her atelier (Nelly 1989: 110–111). I thank Nikos Paissios for bringing Delta’s letter
to my attention.
6
La Grèce actuelle 1933: 51, 61, 97; the first is of a woman in profile looking down in traditional
Attic dress shot in Nelly’s studio with a characteristic shadow cast on the wall (see Damaskos on the
evocative uses of shadows in Nelly’s photographs of classical antiquities, 2008: esp. 322–4); the second,
of a smiling woman in the traditional costume of Thessaly on a mountain top; and, the third, a woman
in profile with her back to us to showcase the ornate traditional dress and headdress of Epirus.
7
Nelly 1989: 305–6; on the collection, see Boudouri 2001. Nelly’s archive of written notes is
now lost, which impedes any secure dating of her photos.
8
In the 1980s the two architects donated a photo-album to the Benaki archives, but most of
their collection is stored privately in Athens. I am currently working on a publication on the official and
unofficial discourses evident in the choice of artifacts on display in the Greek pavilion.
9
This album is written in an uncritical and exalting spirit and, for all intents and purposes, may
serve as a sequel to Nelly’s autobiography as it has been produced in close collaboration with her, as
both the editor Fotopoulos, and the two contributors, A. Xanthakis (2008: 303, 496) and E. Trichon-
Milsani (1990: 41), attest.
extensive recent bibliography, especially on the work of Irini Boudouri, former

curator of Nelly’s archive at the Benaki Museum.
‘Like a picture’
In the classical ideal aesthetic expressed by Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–467 BC), ‘on
the one hand, painting is silent poetry, on the other, poetry is painting that speaks’
(Plut. Moralia 346–7). Echoes of this aesthetic are present in Nelly’s personal
narrative and output, and are aptly captured in her assertion: ‘A good picture is
worth ten thousand words’ (Nelly 1989: 41).10 How visual images were conveyed
and processed is the subject of a long-standing debate in the social theories of
visual representation and visual culture, some of which I will draw on.
First, in some very broad strokes, I begin with a couple of images from the
iconography of ‘Hellenism,’ western and indigenous, and a few words on the
politics of national identity formation to place this chapter in an ideological
context. During the Neoclassicism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
western travellers to Greece treated the country as a museum. They bore with
them an eternal image of a sublime Greece, a spiritual landscape severed from
contemporary social circumstance and context, a view influenced by the paintings
and photographs of western artists and the writings of classical scholars of the
period.11 After independence, Greece became ‘a landscape with ruins’ (Papaioannou
2005: 46) and the liberated Greeks, as Hamilakis (2007) has shown, turned their
classical monuments to topiosima (landmarks, as termed by Hamilakis) in the
narrative of a new national charter myth. This myth produced the imaginary topos
of Hellenism drawing from and revising imported images of western Hellenism
(Leontis 1995).
The western ideological, and the later (and current) economic colonisation
of Greece, produced a unique nation-state. In early 1830, Greece was the first
nation-state ‘with full sovereignty and international recognition’ in Europe,
albeit in an ongoing client-status (Beaton 2008: 8; also, Beaton 2009) and as
such, constituting a prime example of ‘crypto-colonialism’ (Herzfeld 2002).
Fanon’s (1968: 206–48) cultural evolution schema among the colonised offers a
blueprint for analysing the national imaginary project of the ‘crypto-colonised’
10
Nelly paraphrases a ‘Chinese’ proverb; this phrase seems to have been coined by Fred Barnard
in an issue of the journal Printer’s Ink (10 March 1927), who is quoted as admitting to adding a Chinese
provenance to the proverb ‘so that people would take it seriously’; Stevenson 1948: 2611.
11
On travellers to Greece and the Mediterranean, see Peltre 2011. On early photographic
depictions of Greece, see Antonatos and Mauzy 2003 and Antoniadis 2008. On Poussin’s ‘Shepherds
of Arcadia’ of 1637–38, one of the earliest depictions of an exotic image of pastoral Greece, and the
meaning of ‘et in Arcadia ego’, see Beard and Henderson: 1995: 117–26.
Greek nation-state.12 For, even though Greece was never formally colonised, it
was ‘imagined’ in processes similar to those encountered in the conversion of
the colonial imaginary to the national. Furthermore, the nationalist imaginary
projects of the colonised are re-workings of earlier colonial ideas.13 In the case
of the Greek national project, the concepts of the continuity of the Greek race
and the supremacy of the classical past are two such ideas. The liberated Greeks
appropriated and modified them. They did away with the ‘allochronic technique’
of the Philhellenes who saw the modern Greeks as ‘survivals of the classical
heritage’ ‘out of time and history’ (Hamilakis 2007: 21), thus bracketing off the
in-between centuries since classical antiquity. Instead, the modern nation-state
adopted the national historiographical schema of Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos,
which elevated and integrated Byzantium as the necessary link in the continuous
3,000-year-old grand-national narrative.14
National photography, which produced the iconography of the new state,
mediated reality in the service of the western colonial-cum-national project
(Hamilakis 2008). Greece was at different periods perceived as exotic, ‘picturesque’
– a picture, and as such always prefigured, always already an image (see Krauss
1981). As the Greek diasporic subject became immersed in the imported western
colonial ideas of the national imagery, in her first encounters with Greece Nelly
saw the prefigured images of her childhood imagination. Spurred by the nostalgic
stories for the motherland narrated by her middle-class Asia-Minor parents at the
time of the Great Idea, she saw ‘ready pictures’ waiting to be captured everywhere:
‘When I met Greece and saw its many beauties, almost on every step I saw yet
another painting in front of me. Wherever I turned, I would encounter pictures
ready to be shot. Our Greece can make every man an artist’ (Nelly 1989: 79; see
also Trichon-Milsani 1990: 42, 44, 48).
In an essay where she likens the camera to a gun, Sontag (1979: 15)
notes the ‘elegiac’ character of photography: ‘When we are afraid, we shoot.
But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. It is a nostalgic time now’, and
even more so, I might add, for the interwar period in Greece, following the
destruction of Smyrna in 1922. By the same token, though, photographs ‘being
taken now transform what is present into a mental image, like the past’ (Sontag
1979: 167). Nelly photographed the Greek monuments, the landscapes, and
the people looking to bring the past alive and to establish continuities with
the present. Her aesthetics followed German classicism, but her technique was
12
Fanon recognises three phases: the assimilationist phase, when the colonised offer proof
of the conformity to the culture of the coloniser; the cultural nationalist phase, where the colonised
intellectuals discover their own culture and resist assimilation; the nationalist phase, where the colonised
fight the occupying forces.
13
In Amuta’s elaboration of Fanon’s schema, the second phase of cultural reaffirmation of the
colonised is characterised by unbridled traditionalism and a recourse to the resuscitation of past glories
(1989: 159).
14
See also Stathatos, Moschovi and Tsirgialou, this volume.
modern, though she also developed an expertise in the pictorialist bromoil

process, which likened her images to paintings, and gave them an antiquarian
feeling due to the ‘old-school’ patina. The enigmatic apostrophe in her
signature has not been addressed successfully in recent scholarship. I argue
that Nelly intentionally adopted the signature ‘Nelly’s’ to replicate the standard
of Byzantine icon-painters who signed with their name in the genitive case to
indicate that the ‘writing’ of the icon was by their own hand. In Nelly’s case,
it is my contention that it reveals her intention to stress the affinity of her

photography to painting, staking out a place for herself in the fine arts national
annals.15 This comes at the very core of the artistic persona Nelly sought to
propagate.
During her first tour in Greece in 1927, Nelly visited Tripoli and saw two
men with ‘true biblical physiognomies’, while during a visit to Hypate, she saw
a shepherd that ‘appeared to me as an ancient god’ (Nelly 1989: 94, 98, 111).16
This man, she argues, gave her the idea for ‘parallelisms’, sets of photographs
where contemporary Greeks are set next to ancient monuments to accentuate
their resemblance and establish visually the continuity of the Greek race (see
also Trichon-Milsani 1990: 46). Extremely proud of her ‘parallelisms’ idea,
Nelly developed it through the years and even had an article published in
Life magazine (Nelly 1989: 276, 280); and until her very late age, she wished
to publish the parallelism pictures in an album. When she was commissioned
to create the collages for the Greek pavilion, she gave the shepherd’s head a
prominent position in her ‘parallelisms’ giant-poster (Fig. 11.1), and
the photographic collage (‘synthesis’) that features the head of the shepherd, I now have in
my home gallery, and thus I see it many times per day. At every glance I cast upon him, I
reminisce the times I photographed him and what a great impression that simple man made
upon me, that I thought I was seeing a god from Olympus (Nelly 1989: 112).
This is Nelly’s ‘private pantheon’, to borrow a phrase from Sontag (1979: 162).
The Metaxas regime similarly advocated cultural and racial continuity and
the inherent superiority of the Greek race. In a 1936 lecture to university
students in Athens, Metaxas (1969: I, 73) admonished his young audience
to strive towards a national rebirth and return to selected moments of the
glorious past. He asked them to close their ears to ‘songs of the Sirens’
and, as a modern Odysseus, return to the ‘springs of Hellenic civilisation.’
15
Note that she always wanted to exhibit in the National Gallery pressing the point about her
photography being equivalent to painting, but due to regulations was prohibited from doing so: ‘only in
that space could the volume and diversity of my work be hosted, and honoured (let me not talk myself
about the quality, which the foreign experts recognised). Unfortunately, our National Gallery did not
organise photographic exhibitions’ (Nelly 1990: 298–9).
16
See also Damaskos (2008: 327–31) for a discussion of Nelly’s ‘comparisons’ illustrated by a
good selection of relevant photos by Nelly from the Benaki archives.
Figure 11.1 Nelly, Collage of Greek physiognomies decorating the hall of

ancient sculptures where five originals, a number of replicas by Emile
Gilliéron & Son, and some contemporary sculptures are exhibited
in the Greek Pavilion ‘Hall of Ancient Sculptures’ at the 1939 New
York World Fair
Source: Printed by permission from the Moretis Archive
‘[T]o move forward, we need to go back, as did Ulysses’ comrades’ (see also
Carabott 2003: 27).17 This ‘going back’ to ‘move towards’ and ‘being with’ others
in the present for a better future echoes Heidegger’s Dasein and his views on
authentic temporality in Being and Time (1978 [1927]). Metaxas – and Nelly –
was imbued with German values and culture. The ‘Third Hellenic Civilisation’
project was Metaxas’ ideological construct for his regime as the historical
successor to ancient Greek culture and the Christian Byzantine Empire, in
the mode of Hitler’s Third Reich (see Hamilakis 2007: chapter 5; also, Petrakis
2006). By 1941, the regime’s youth organization, EON, numbered 750,000
young members, indoctrinated in the regime’s nationalist charter myth.
17
Interestingly, this is the very speech two former women members of Metaxas’s youth
organization EON, Eleni Frangia-Papadimou and Antigoni Vryoni-Hatzitheodorou, recount in
interviews posted by Yannis Papadimas on the website of Metaxas’ grand-daughter, Ioanna Foka-
Metaxa (www.ioannismetaxas.com).
Bourdieu (1977: 170–71) cautions us against the power of a leader who,

in moments of crisis which call for ‘extraordinariness’ (Ausseralltäglichkeit),
employs language to ‘mobilise the group by announcing to them what they want
to hear’. The ‘heretical power’ of the leader ‘rests on the dialectical relationship
between authorised, authorising language and the group which authorises
it and acts on its authority’. Nelly was very much aware of her charismatic
camera skills, her ‘extraordinariness’, which she had honed successfully over the
years having established a clear personal signature in composition and artistry.

She believed image to be more direct and enduring than writing (so too Sontag
2003: 66), an ‘authentic’ eyewitness. Hence, she considered the commission
by the Under-Secretariat of Press and Tourism as an opportunity for her to
showcase the beauty of Greece (Nelly 1989: 147). Nelly’s ‘parallelisms’ project
derived its power through the objectification of everyday people, whom she
turned into icons of the authorised official discourse on racial and cultural
continuity. By doing so, Nelly legitimated and reinforced the very authority
of the Metaxas regime she served (Bourdieu 1977: 170–71). Nelly led
‘the way back’ to ‘the springs of Hellenic civilisation’ (Metaxas 1969: I, 73)
by meticulously documenting the visual similarities of contemporary Greeks
to their ancient forebears. Her photography provided the yardstick for
Metaxas’s national cultural dream for a Third Hellenic Civilisation. At the
age of 95, when Nelly was interviewed on a Greek television programme, she
reiterated with conviction her belief in the continuity and supremacy of the
Greek race:
The Times of London wrote, a gentleman there, that we, the Greeks of today, are not
descended from the ancients but from gypsies, from the Albanians and from such races
and that we are of mixed race. I was really furious when I heard this. And I had done a
photomontage of parallelisms that I had made for the exhibition in New York, an immense,
a huge picture from the floor to the ceiling. And at my own expense, I made thousands of
posters so that we could spread them everywhere, so that they may see that even the shepherds
in the mountains have the ancient features (emphasis added; excerpt from Nelly’s interview
on 10 June 1994 for the ‘Monogramma’ television series with Alexis Savvakis as special
consultant).
In both her autobiography and in the many albums of her work that have
appeared to this date, Nelly presents herself as having lived in a capsule,
isolated from the artistic, ideological trends and political upheavals of the
troubled interwar period in Greece and Europe. She even claims she was
‘apolitical’ (Nelly 1989: 303). What lenses did she use to filter her reality? Did
she, perchance, apply the bromoil process to smoothen the edges and turn
adversity into a more palatable experience? Any latent influences she would
have us believe she absorbed seamlessly into her own well-digested personal
photographic signature, Nelly’s. And yet, even one of her loyal defenders is
clearly baffled by Nelly’s denial of any familiarity with the ‘deep classicism’
movement in visual arts and the ‘myth of Hellenism’ (Trichon-Milsani 1990:

44); another notes the similarity of one of her photos to Man Ray, though
Nelly denied it (Xanthakis 2008: 300); yet another illustrates Nelly’s debt to
Frédéric Boissonnas, and Hans Holdt and her proximity to Leni Riefenstahl
and Walter Hege (Boudouri 2003: 17, 18, 27–9; also Damaskos 2008: 332–
4). In a 1938 newspaper article, archaeologist Alexandros Filadelfefs, then
director of the National Archaeological Museum, is hailed as the instigator
of the ‘parallelisms’ concept.18 It may well have been that Filadelfefs proposed
this important ‘national and artistic’ study to the officials or that Nikoloudis
commissioned Nelly to complete four large collages for the 1939 Greek pavilion
(Damaskos 2008: 330f.). Still, Nelly’s silence on the matter agrees with her
pattern of asserting her independence from outside influences or trends.
In a recent discussion of Nelly’s work, the evidence is considered inconclusive
as to whether ‘her ancestor worship was just the product of the naivety of
an ignorant romantic, exploited by the machinery of the Metaxas regime’
(Damaskos 2008: 334). However, the materials in the Moretis archives revealed
more collages by Nelly in the 1939 Greek pavilion. In line with the regime’s
exhortation for the cultivation of every ‘inch of Hellenic earth’ (Metaxas 1969:
II, 140), spearheaded by Metaxas who is routinely featured as the ‘First Farmer’
(Hamilakis 2007: 174–5), I discovered two collages by Nelly’s with peasant
women and men involved in agricultural activities. Furthermore, I found
Nelly’s collages depicting young children, reading, exercising, and dancing on
the centre of the collage, overseen by a young male athlete, themes repeatedly
iterated in all the propaganda youth magazines of the Metaxas regime
(Fig. 11.2).
In this chapter, I argue for Nelly’s more active and wholehearted engagement
with the Metaxas regime. Nelly was a charismatic agent of the regime’s
iconography. She produced the images that transformed antiquities and folk
art into monuments of national memory. At the same time, these very images
became iconographic testimonia legitimising the national charter myth that
dreamed the heterotopic locus of the nation (Foucault 1986; Gourgouris 1996;
18
O Typos, 14 April 1938: 3, article entitled ‘The Eternal Greek race: the contemporary Greek
men and women look like our ancient progenitors. An idea of Mr. Al. Filadelfefs.’ The article is
illustrated with a photograph of the head of an old Peloponnesian peasant ‘paralleled’ to the bronze
head of Artemision Zeus, the very same shepherd Nelly photographed in Hypate, without stating its
provenance. The second photograph of a young woman from Preveza mentioned by name in the main
text (but misidentified as an Athenian woman in the caption) was taken by Filadelfefs and is posted
in parallel to the marble head of a woman from Tegea in Arkadia (probably Hygeia, ca. 350–325 BC)
on display in the National Archaeological Museum. In the main text, Filadelfefs urges the readers to
send more live models to the National Archaeological Museum to further ‘his’ idea of a ‘parallelisms’
project. See also Karali 2013, on the provenance of the idea for Nelly’s nude photographs on the
Acropolis and Filadelfefs’s more active involvement; and, above nn. 1–2.
Figure 11.2 Nelly, Collages exhibited in the 1939 Greek Pavilion

Source: Printed by permission from the Moretis Archive
Leontis 1995; Hamilakis 2007). Images do not exist in a vacuum, as Nelly and
her admirers would have us believe. They are socially constructed, exchanged
and nationalised. They add value and meaning to heritage sites and artefacts (see
essays in Waterton and Watson 2010). Once objectified, they become consumed
landscapes that can be owned as material artefacts or postcards promoting a
tourist image of Greece. Nelly reportedly photographed the Acropolis as ‘an act
of devotion to eternal Greece’ and was ‘the first to produce and sell postcards with
photographs of antiquities’ (Trichon-Milsani 1990: 46), thus actively promoting
her perspective of viewing Greek antiquities. Later generations would turn her
very images into national heritage and the maker of these images into a national
treasure, as we shall see below.
The cult of beauty
In her autobiography, Nelly often makes rapid transitions from traumatic

experiences to more pleasant memories. She glosses over adverse circumstances
and events ‘beautifying’ her experiences in the selective memory of a diasporic
Greek who was displaced from Aydin to Dresden, to Athens, to New York,
and finally back to Athens. She soldiered on through the difficulties that befell
her and through hard work overcame them.19 She does not linger on the bad
memories, but tends to overstate the good ones.20
Her praise-singers are quick to point out Nelly’s love for ‘the beauty of the
anonymous crowd’ (Zotos, in Nelly 1989: 10) and for Greece as the driving
forces for her aesthetic and life choices (Trichon-Milsani 1990: 41). One critic
even attempts to fend off possible criticism of a borderline ‘nationalistic’ love
of Greece by stating that ‘she believed she was directly linked to antiquity’
(Xanthakis 1996: 31). Nelly followed the turn to classical aesthetics, which
stemmed from the need for order after the chaos that followed the destruction
of WWI, and, in her case, after the 1922 Smyrna disaster. By the mid-1930s,
the clean lines and figuration of Classicism ‘functioned as both a vehicle for
mourning and an assertion of beauty’ (Silver 2010: preface),21 later hijacked by
Hitler and Mussolini with devastating results.
Nelly singled out ‘beauty’ and staged compositions that idealised rural life, and
in so doing she actually turned peasants into images of themselves. In her travels
in Greece, she became what Sontag describes as the photographer as ‘supertourist’,
‘always trying to colonise new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar
subjects’ (1979: 42). Indeed, Nelly’s critics are quick to note the inconsistency
between the serene landscape, the idyllic portrayal of the peasants, and the realities
of human toil and hardship in the midst of the harsh natural world. Nelly develops
‘an eternal image of Greece’, searches for peacefulness and ‘for the timelessness
of the Greek race in the portraits of country folk’ and delivers compositions of
‘incomparable beauty and boundless-optimism’ (Boudouri 1998: 97–8).
I feel spontaneously attracted by everything that is beautiful. Yes: beauty, harmony. And
perhaps this care for composition, this aspiration to form is in effect something very German
[...] unconscious and not from my knowledge. […] Whatever is purely realistic, slice-of-life,
which is average, quotidian, doesn’t interest me […] I am fascinated by what is beautiful,
strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony. When harmony is produced I am happy
(Sontag 1972: 85).
These words are spoken by Leni Riefenstahl, not by Nelly. Riefenstahl seems
to follow a reverse trajectory to that of Nelly’s career.22 She began with silent
19
‘From an early age, I was eager to learn whatever beautiful I saw’: sewing and fashion, painting
porcelains, making lamps, and cooking; Nelly 1989: 25, 18, 21, 23–4, 26, 196, 294, 287, 230, 226,
respectively.
20
For example, she reports that her father had lost all his property in Smyrna, and as a refugee
in Athens took such great care of his ‘small chalet’, ‘the most beautiful place’ in Nea Smyrni, that the
beauty of his manicured garden prompted visits by the mayor of Athens, Kostas Kotzias (Nelly 1989:
142, 296).
21
On the modernist trend for a ‘healthy body culture’ with respect to Nelly’s nudes, see Damaskos
2008: 324–7.
22
For a comparison of Nelly with Riefenstahl, see Damaskos 2008: 332–4.
films replete with pro-Nazi imagery, quickly enlisting her talent to create some
of the most successful and evocative propaganda films ever, only to resort in
the last quarter of her long life to taking ethnographic photos and films, when
all other avenues for her creative talents had been closed off. In ‘Fascinating
Fascism’, a seminal critique of Riefenstahl’s late photographic album Last of the
Nuba, Sontag aims to lay open the utopian aesthetics of fascist art, which extol
‘physical perfection,’ and feature ‘identity as a biological given’. She highlights
fascist art ideals that continue to seduce, including ‘the ideal of life as art’ and
‘the cult of beauty’ (1972: 96). So too Eco (1995) includes the ‘cult of beauty’ in
his account of fascist ideology. With these observations in mind, let us proceed
to a careful examination of Nelly’s involvement with the Metaxas regime and
fascist aesthetics.
‘National photographer’
Nelly’s bourgeois upbringing and her studies in German aesthetics and culture
(she even married a German-raised diasporic Greek, Angelos Seraidaris) may
account for her work ethic. She venerated hard work, recalling Weber’s protestant
ethics and spirit of capitalism where one sees one’s craft as a ‘calling.’ When
Nelly opened her first studio in Athens and attracted the Greek bourgeoisie,
she remembers: ‘Seeing all the world embracing me with love and kindness,
I also tried my hardest to please them and was very glad when they left my studio
satisfied’ (Nelly 1989: 70, emphasis added).
Nelly is selective with the memories she records in her autobiography. It
is worth pondering briefly on her choice of words and narrative to probe how
she stitches together her self-portrait. She is certainly not forthcoming with
information that would connect her more closely with the Metaxas regime.
As it transpires, however, her brother-in-law, married to her sister Maro, was
Spyros Malaspinas, voted into office in 1936 as a member of the Parliament for
the Cyclades.23 He soon became the vice-president of PIKPA (Foundation for
Social Providence) and the Red Cross, when the president was Konstantinos
Georgakopoulos, his close friend (Nelly 1989: 184), who became Minister of
Education for the Metaxas regime.24 In her autobiography, Nelly (1989: 173)
only mentions the Metaxas dictatorship once, merely in reference to the period
of time, but never to the regime itself. In the epilogue to her autobiography, after
23
He was a native of Santorini, hence Nelly’s album (Braggiotti 1987) with photos taken
probably in the 1930s.
24
Georgakopoulos eventually tried to overturn the Metaxas regime and resigned on 25
November 1938. Malaspinas served as Minister for Social Welfare when Konstantinos Georgakopoulos
was appointed as staff Prime Minister in a transitional government in 1958 (5 March–17 May). See a
photograph of the Malaspinas couple in Nelly 1989: 177.
expressing her gratitude for the late recognition of her oeuvre in Greece (1989:
300, 301, 302) she makes a strong statement:
I was never coloured politically. We in Asia Minor since we were young all learned to love
Eleftherios Venizelos. We knew only him and believed only in him. All the years I have been
in Greece, I never got involved with politics; I believed it was not my business. And neither
am I on anyone’s side now (Nelly 1989: 303).
She portrays herself as a simple Venizelist refugee from Asia Minor, apolitical
her entire life, though she was actively working within the dominant ideology
of the Metaxas regime producing the images that nourished and propagated it.
In the programme from her first exhibition at the O’Toole Gallery in New York,
Nelly is listed as the official photographer of the royal family and of the Greek
government (Nelly 1989: 198). And though I could not locate any photographs
of Theologos Nikoloudis in Nelly’s archive at the Benaki Museum, there were
at least two such photos attributed to her, one in the brochure for the 1939
Greek pavilion, and another on the cover page of the 3 May 1939 issue of the
Greek daily newspaper Makedonia. Nelly also actively produced photographs
and photomontages for the regime’s youth organization EON and the magazine
Neolaia. Such photos rarely bear her signature, though her aesthetic composition
is indisputable. An indicative selection of EON collages forms part of the
collection Nelly’s donated to the Benaki Museum (Fig. 11.3). Nelly’s admirers
tactfully gloss over this portion of her oeuvre (Trichon-Milsani 1990: 44).
During her 1937 visit to Berlin, Nelly photographed Mussolini’s entrance
into the Berlin stadium while seated two rows above Hitler and Mussolini. She
reportedly donated photo albums of her work to both Goebbels and Hitler
(Nelly 1989: 171). During her visit with her husband to Goebbels’s mansion,
Nelly recounts the impression her photos made on Goebbels’s wife. Seizing
the opportunity, Nelly requested that Goebbels recommend her to UFA, the
‘Hollywood’ of Germany, to be trained in shooting documentaries, presumably
due to her admiration for Riefenstahl’s recent work. Riefenstahl had received
numerous awards for her technique in the notorious propaganda film Triumph
of the Will (1935), which documented the 1934 Nazi Congress in Nuremberg.
Following that success, Hitler had commissioned Riefenstahl to film the 1936
Olympic Games, which Nelly also attended. Nelly visited Olympia in 1932 and
1937, and quite possibly with Riefenstahl during her visit in 1936 for the filming
of the Berlin Olympics.25 Coincidentally, a new round of German excavations in
Olympia began in April 1937 and in early 1938 the Greek Minister of Education
and German officials visited the site (Hamilakis 2007: 196). In Nelly’s archive,
donated to the Benaki, there survives the portrait she made of Hitler.
25
Riefenstahl’s visit to Olympia resulted in the documentary feature film Olympia (1938). On
Nelly’s visit to Olympia, see her oral testimony to Nikos Paissios in 1996, and Damaskos 2008: 333; so
too in Boudouri 2003: 27.
Figure 11.3 Nelly, Collage for the Metaxas regime’s youth (EON)
Nelly continued working for the Metaxas regime and produced a number
of collages that formed the backdrop to the exhibits in the Greek Pavilion at
the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Indeed, Nelly arrived at the port of New
York with her husband aboard the SS Queen Mary on 21 August 1939 to
attend the opening events for the Greek pavilion. Once the war broke out, the
couple stayed in New York for 27 years. While in the United States, and before
the postal service to Greece was interrupted during WWII, Nelly’s family
mailed her a large number of her negatives. These included the photographs
of the May 1939 excavation at Thermopylae, which had been carried out by
the General Director of Greek Antiquities, Spyros Marinatos (1901–74), and
financed by his friend, the American Elizabeth Hunt, who years later was
awarded the esteemed Phoenix medal and was named honorary citizen of both
Sparta and Athens (Ethnos 23/5/1951: 3). Marinatos published his excavation
report in the regime’s semi-official journal in a narrative steeped in nationalistic
ideology setting up the ancient battle for emulation by the regime’s youth
(Hamilakis 2007: 169–73). Unlike the demoticist Metaxas, Marinatos was a
fierce supporter of the archaising purist Greek language (katharévousa) and

considered any student spelling failings an indication of sub-humanity. He
believed that ‘if scripts were subjected to the idiocy test used in Germany,
most Greek pupils would be classified as imbeciles and sent for sterilisation’
(Mackridge 2009: 31).
In her autobiography, in the section on her ‘national and artistic activity’
in the States, Nelly discusses how she invited William Dinsmoor, Professor of
Classical Architecture at Columbia University, to draw a map of the ancient

battle of Thermopylae (1989: 195, 196–7, 200–202) and went on a lecture tour
at American universities with Marinatos to raise awareness about the plight of
Greece in WWII (Xanthakis 1997: 28), often donating half the proceeds of the
sales of her work for the benefit of the Greek War Relief Association (Baltimore
Museum of Art, 2/7/1941). Nelly and Marinatos paradoxically sought to
indoctrinate an audience that was distinctively anti-Axis using vocabulary
that had been associated with fascist leanings. The content of the lectures and
photographic selection would have invoked similar nationalist references to the
glorious past with aspirations for the advent of the Third Hellenic Civilisation.26
Her admirers refer to her national pride, as when, in November 1939, she donated
her photo-album to Mrs Roosevelt: ‘She must have felt the pleasure of someone
who through the medium of her art has conveyed perhaps the fullest picture
of what “Greekness” means’ (Trichon-Milsani 1990: 44). Nelly could not have
been more intimately involved with the Metaxas ideology than when she was
collaborating with the regime’s foremost archaeologist contributing her pictures,
promptly enlisted to rouse up the diaspora Greeks and the classically trained
American audiences to action.
In the States, Nelly’s friends were the editor of the royalist diaspora
newspaper Atlantis (Nelly 1989: 186), and not the Venizelist Ethnikos Kyrix,
a curious allegiance for an Asia Minor refugee and Nikos Pattakos, brother
of Stylianos, who later became one of the three 1967 junta dictators (Nelly
1989: 287). Her closest friend was Kostas Kotzias (1893–1951), who had been
elected mayor of Athens in 1934 (Nelly’s 1989: 142, 207, 253, 274, 277). In his
speech at the Italian Institute in Athens in January 1935, Kotzias referred to the
‘atmosphere of mutual trust and sincerity’ that was impressed upon him during
his recent meeting with Mussolini. Such a comment was rather callous given
the fact that the Dodecanese was still under Italian occupation since the Italo-
Turkish war of 1912, and just on the day before Kotzias’s talk, Kalymnos had
rebelled against its Italian occupiers. The inopportune meeting with Mussolini
26
Interestingly, Metaxas’s resistance to Mussolini’s ultimatum has recently resurfaced in
nationalist sites which liken Metaxas’s stance to ‘Leonidas and the 300,’ on the grounds that the
Italian army was eight times larger, and, also to Konstantinos Palaiologos’s resistance to the Ottomans
during the siege of Constantinople when he reportedly replied in Leonidas’s words ‘μωλόν λαβέ’
(‘come and take them’); e.g. http://www.metaxas-project.com/who-was-metaxas/ (last accessed on 15
August 2013). See also reference to the ‘Greek DNA’ YouTube video in Damaskos 2008: 334 n. 43.
and Kotzias’s tactless comments provoked a protest by two Greek youths, as

reported in the national newspaper Proia (25 January 1935). In August 1936,
Kotzias had been appointed Secretary of State for Athens by the Metaxas
regime. In September 1936, he received Goebbels in Athens. Kotzias often
travelled to Germany and befriended the Nazi regime officials throughout his
appointment. In July 1940, Kotzias was implicated in an attempt to overturn
Metaxas with German assistance. Yet, in 1941, after Metaxas’s death, when
King George II asked Kotzias to form a government, he declined. Instead,

during the Axis occupation, Kotzias moved to the States, where he had already
cultivated his relationship with AHEPA since 1934.27
In her autobiography, Nelly (1989: 253) denied allegations of Kotzias’s
involvement with the Italian and German regimes. She bemoaned the ‘troubles’
experienced by Kotzias, whom she believed to have been falsely accused with
‘fake photographs’, even though a number of these photos survive (Fig. 11.4).
Nelly expresses her frustration at the treatment of Kotzias’s sons who were
repeatedly denied admission to American universities as ‘sons of fascists’, until
Kotzias’s friend, Emma Russell, secretly financed their studies at Harvard.
Kotzias also solicited Russell’s assistance to organise a grand opening reception
for Nelly’s new studio in New York. Emma Russell belonged to the elite ‘New
York 400’ and invited all her high-society acquaintances (Nelly 1989: 206–8).
Incidentally, at both the opening reception of her studio in New York, and later
at her fundraising exhibition for WWII at the Baltimore Museum in 1941,
which showcased her photographs of antiquities, Nelly welcomed her eminent
guests in a Queen Amalia 1837 romantic court folk-dress,28 fashioning herself
as a Greek cultural ‘ambassador’ (Xanthakis 1990: 28). Indeed, Nelly presents
a good candidate for the kind of ‘long-distance’ nationalism Anderson (1992)
describes, whereby the diasporic subject retains the national identity of the ‘old
country,’ embodying the cultural signifiers of that identity.
Since her rediscovery in Greece after the return to democracy in 1974, Nelly’s
connections with the Metaxas regime have been trivialised or silenced altogether.
When interest in Nelly’s work was rekindled, there followed a series of exhibitions,
documentaries, and publications of large photographic albums, all sponsored by
renowned state and private foundations and museums. One cannot fail to notice an
attempt to rehabilitate, nationalise, and monumentalise Nelly’s work and recast her
as the ‘photographer of the nation,’ a cultural ambassador for Greece, a national hero
who captured the image of ‘the “Greece” we all carry inwardly, the “Greece” to which
we all return to, the “Greece” we cannot easily overcome’ (Boudouri 1996: 14).
27
AHEPA (American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association) is a Greek-American
service organisation, which supports charities that promote ‘Hellenic identity’ in the States. See photos
of Kotzias with AHEPA officials and members in the MIET/ELIA collection: L118.210, L118.211,
L119.005, L119.024, L119.163.
28
Queen Amalia originally envisioned her dress as an imitation of the Greek folk dress in an
attempt to conquer the hearts of the local peasants.
Figure 11.4 Unknown photographer, Kotzias (second from left) with Third Reich
officials in Dresden, 1936
Source: Photo L119.222 © MIET/ELIA Photographic Archive
In 1990 the Agricultural Bank of Greece published a large illustrated volume

with a good selection of Nelly’s diverse oeuvre. One of the contributors to the
volume hailed her as ‘Greece’s unofficial ambassador to the US’ and triumphantly
set her up for emulation: ‘the “Nelly phenomenon,” a model of ethics and artistic
endeavour, has, I believe, all the features to make it an ideal for young artists
even today’ (Xanthakis 1990: 28). And in 1996, a contributor to a special issue of
the daily Kathimerini on her work placed Nelly’s on the pedestal as ‘the national
photographer’ recalling with nostalgia a better past:
The Greek state honours her work. It is recognised for the importance of its national
contribution […]. Her presence is comforting in our midst during these anti-spiritual
and anti-creative times. She is the last link that connects us with our noble past. Her
photographs will always lead us back to the lands of Nostos […] re-instructing us in love of
Greece. For this reason, therefore, almost triumphantly [πανηγυρικώς] she deserves the title
of the national photographer (Savvakis 1996: 6).
Which one of the national pasts is it that Nelly is hailed for recording and
recalling? The transcendental Greece of dreams? Is it the classical past of ruins?
Is it the idyllic life of peasants in tamed natural landscapes? In the Kathimerini
special issue, there is no room for debate and no mention of Nelly’s connection
to the Metaxas regime.29 The mission of the ‘panegyric’ is to monumentalise
and sacralise Nelly’s output, to ‘record’ the interwar period ‘relieved’ of any and
all tensions, and to insert an ‘iconic’ photographer in the annals of the newly-
established democratic Greek state of the metapolitefsi.
A similar process of retrospective ‘purification’ runs through Nelly’s past in
her nationalisation makeover. What is foregrounded in her autobiography is
the iconography of resistance to Nazi Germany. Nelly’s photo on the cover of
Life magazine on 16 December 1940 drives the message home: a soldier sounds
his trumpet calling the Greeks to arms to fight off Italian fascism (Fig. 11.5).30
And yet, this particular image falls into the category of photos reproduced in
the Neolaia magazine to incite the regime’s youth to work hard and to support
the regime’s effort to raise young citizens fit for the Third Hellenic Civilisation
cultural project. And there are more such concerted efforts to brush off
Nelly’s links to fascist ideology and distance her from the Metaxas regime.31
The ‘panegyric’ special issue ends with a cautionary note punctuated by an
exclamation mark that attains the force of a repudiation:
29
Even when Boudouri (1996: 12–13) refers to the commission of the Ministry and Nikoloudis,
she does not mention Metaxas and reports that Nelly began working for Nikoloudis from 1930–39,
though the propaganda ministry was established in 1936 by the dismantling of the earlier tourist
organisation instituted by Venizelos. But however paradoxically, as Roderick Beaton has commented
in a private correspondence, this was also the regime that fought against fascism in 1940–41. On the
political nuances, an instructive source is Seferis’s ‘Manuscript Sept. ’41’.
30
In the introduction to her autobiography (Nelly 1989: 10), next to the photo from Life
magazine, Stefanos Zotos remarks: ‘In the middle of the war, and while Greece is pushing back the
Italian attackers, the cover for Life magazine features an impressive Greek soldier to awaken the world
to fascism and nazism and to their destructive imperialism.’
31
Boudouri (1997: 27) claims that ‘Nelly’s Hellenocentric education with references to classical
antiquity and the romantic approach to the ancient world, in which primarily she sought her own roots,
will keep her away from Nazi ideology, towards which the photographic search for the perfect human body in
Germany was oriented. Other photographers [she cites Walter Hege] of German education […] either
willingly or unwillingly will be enlisted in the service of the aesthetic quests of National Socialism’
(emphasis added). However, see above discussion of Nelly’s ‘parallelisms’ project.
Figure 11.5 Nelly, Photo on the cover of Life magazine (16 December 1940). The
caption reads: ‘The skirted soldier on the cover is a Greek Evzone
(which means literally “well-girdled”). The five Greek regiments of
Evzones specialising in mountain fighting have in six weeks made
a name for themselves that ranks with that of the Finnish ski
troops. Fighting against similar odds, they had last week driven the
overwhelming Italian Army out of Greece and up the Albanian coast.
This was against all rules, for the Greeks were supposed to lose the war
in jig-time. When they last fought, in 1922, they were badly beaten by
the Turks. In battle the Evzone wear khaki skirts’
Sixty years later, another writer doubted the […] democratic spirit of the photographer, because
she agreed to take the official portraits of the royal family at the time, and of the ministers of the
Metaxas government! (Xanthakis 1996: 31).
How dare one doubt Nelly’s patriotic contribution to the national imagery? Her
nationalisation and sacralisation is complete: she is a ‘Living Legend!’ (Εν ζωή
θρύλος), attests the only western contributor to the Kathimerini panegyric, Bodo
von Dewitz, the Director of Agfa Foto-Historama of the Ludwig Museum in

Cologne.
Conclusion
Nelly began her ethnographic pictures in 1927 during her travels to discover a
Greece she had never met but recreated in the nostalgic imaginings of an Asia
Minor diasporic subject, who had lived through the rise and fall of the Great Idea
irredentist national dream. She was imbued with the classical ideas of her upper
class private tutorials and French schooling, and later in the buzzing cultural
life of the city of Dresden in the 1920s. For Nelly, Greece was a ‘picturesque’
and exotic land, implicated in her personal journey of discovery, when at the age
of 25, on her own initiative she set out to explore and photograph a land that
had fascinated her from childhood. With the support of influential members of
her Athenian bourgeoisie clientele, she received commissions from the Greek
Archaeological Society and the Greek Tourist Organisation under Venizelos.
Nelly became more influential when she worked for the Under-Secretariat of
Press and Tourism under Nikoloudis in 1936. She effectively created tourist
images for the regime’s brochures and periodicals, and political collages to
inspire the regime’s youth organisation through its main publication Neolaia.
She promoted her ‘parallelisms’ iconographic project intending to quell any
‘heretical’ attack on the ‘purity’ of the Greek race and refute any argument for
the racial miscegenation of the modern Greeks. Racial continuity was one of the
main ideological thrusts of the Metaxas regime, but it also resonated with Nelly’s
national and personal imaginary. Therefore, she displayed incessant resolve in
developing her own iconographic argument, a testament she bequeathed to the
Greek nation.
Nelly’s life was coterminous with the twentieth century, while her photography
has been recycled to serve various agendas – artistic, touristic, political and
national – for over 70 years: it embraced German romantic classicist aesthetics,
but also flirted with expressionist art in Dresden; it served early tourist policy
under Venizelos; it contributed to the monumentalisation of the Greek landscape,
attempted to assert racial continuity for the Greek folk, and was conscripted to
fuel the nationalist dream of the Third Hellenic Civilisation for the Metaxas
regime; and, by a fortuitous inversion, it donned the iconography of resistance
to the struggling Greek nation under attack and under Nazi occupation during
WWII; it was nationalised in the postwar period and, was, finally, sacralised and
guaranteed a conspicuous place in the national imaginary.
Nelly’s photography presents a rare example of the intersection of visibility
and social power, aesthetics and politics in modern Greece. If we opt with
Baudrillard and the postmodernists to see representation as all there is, and we
choose to give preponderance to discourse over agency, then any photographic
dialogue with the world is debunked (Edwards 2003: 185). In this case, Nelly
would appear as the product of the contemporary discursive, and her agency
would be diminished or altogether abandoned. Still, Leni Riefenstahl failed to
gain sympathy for any mitigating circumstances of the discursive. If, however,
we acknowledge Nelly as a wilful agent of the nationalist myth of cultural
and racial continuity, then, I argue, mutatis mutandis her ‘rediscovery’ during
the metapolitefsi was predicated upon the deliberate suppression of her EON
collages from national memory, placing emphasis instead on her patriotism
during the German occupation, and on her masterful illustration of the
‘beauties’ of an earlier rural Greece of the 1920s and 1930s.
References
Amuta, C. (1989), ‘Fanon, Cabral and Ngugi on National Liberation’ in B. Ashcroft,

G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, New York
and London: Routledge, 158–63.
Anderson, B. (1992), Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of
Identity Politics, Wertheim Lecture, Amsterdam: Centre for Asia Studies.
Antonatos, E. and M. Mauzy (eds) (2003), Early Photographic Panoramas of Greece,
Athens: Potamos.
Antoniadis, K. (ed.) (2008), Η δημιουργική φωτογραφία στην αρχαιολογία: από
τους ταξιδιώτες φωτογράφους του 19ου αιώνα στη δημιουργική φωτογραφία
του 20ού, Athens: Mouseio Benaki.
Beard, M. and J. Henderson (1995), Classics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford:
Beaton, R. (2008), ‘Modern Greece: an old/new nation’, unpublished keynote paper
at the 9th Biennial Conference of the Modern Greek Studies Association of
Australia and New Zealand, La Trobe University.
Beaton, R. (2009), ‘Introduction’, in R. Beaton and D. Ricks (eds), The Making of
Modern Greece Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896),
Aldershot: Ashgate, 1–18.
Boudouri, I. (1996), ‘Η ελληνική ύπαιθρος. Τις αρμονικές σχέσεις των ανθρώπων
με το ήρεμο ελληνικό τοπίο αποτύπωσε η Nelly’s’, in E. Traiou (ed.), ‘Η Ελλάδα
με το φακό της Nelly’s’, Kathimerini, Epta Imeres (30 June): 12–14.
Boudouri, I. (1997), ‘Χορευτική φωτογραφία και κλασικό ιδεώδες’, in Nelly’s,
Σώμα και χορός, Athens: Agra and Ammos, 19–28.
Boudouri, I. (1998), ‘The Greek countryside’, in K. Koskina (ed.) (2008), Nelly’s:

From Athens to New York. A Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of Elli
Souyoutzoglou-Seraidari, Athens: Bastas, 97–9.
Boudouri, I. (2000), Λεύκωμα Nelly’s, Σώμα και Χορός, Κατάλογος έκθεσης
8 Μαΐου–9 Ιουνίου, Athens: MIET, Benaki Museum, International Dance
Centre of Kalamata.
Boudouri, I. (2001), ‘The photographic collection of the Benaki Museum and the
Nelly Archive’, in M. Harder (ed.), Nelly: Dresden, Athens, New York, Munich,
London and New York: Prestel, 7–11.
Boudouri, I. (2003), ‘Nelly’s: Φωτογραφικές προσεγγίσεις της αρχαίας τέχνης’ in
Nelly’s, Αρχαιότητες-Ελλάδα 1925–1939, Athens: Melissa, 14–29.
Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Braggiotti, L. (ed.) (2001), Nelly’s Santorini 1925–1930, Athens: Arheio Theiraikon
Meleton.
Carabott, P. (2003), ‘Monumental Visions: the Past in Metaxas’s Weltanschauung’,
in K.S. Brown and Y. Hamilakis (eds), The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories,
London: Lexington Books, 23–37.
Damaskos, D. (2008), ‘The Uses of Antiquity in Photographs by Nelly: Imported
Modernism and Home-Grown Ancestor Worship in Inter-War Greece’, in
D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and
Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, Athens: Mouseio Benaki, 321–36.
Eco, U. (1995), ‘Ur-fascism,’ New York Review of Books (22 June).
Edwards, S. (2003), ‘Snapshooters of History: Passages on the Postmodern
Argument’, in L. Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader, New York and London:
Routledge, 180–95.
Fanon, F. (1968), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.
Fotopoulos, D. (ed.) (1990), Nelly’s, Athens: Agrotiki Trapeza tis Ellados.
Foucault, M. (1986), ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics 16(1): 22–7.
Gourgouris, S. (1996), Enlightenment, Colonisation and the Institution of Modern
Greece, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Greek Tourist Poster (2007), Athens: The Ministry of Tourist Development and the
Greek Tourist Organisation.
Hamilakis, Y. (2007), The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National
Hamilakis, Y. (2008), ‘Decolonising Greek Archaeology: Indigenous Archaeologies,
Modernist Archaeology and the Post-Colonial Critique’, in D. Damaskos and
D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in
Twentieth-Century Greece, Athens: Mouseio Benaki, 273–84.
Heidegger, M. (1978), Being and Time, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Herzfeld, M. (2002), ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism’,
South Atlantic Quarterly 101: 899–926.
Karali, M. (2013), ‘Γυμνοί χοροί στον Παρθενώνα: μιά τετριμμένη αφήγηση υπό
το φως νέων δεδομένων’, Historica 300(58): 59–92.
Krauss, R. (1981), ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist

Repetition’, October 18: 47–66.
La Grèce actuelle (1933), Athens: Ministère des Affaires Étrangères.
Leontis, A. (1995), Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, Ithaca:
Mackridge, P. (2009), Language and National Identity in Greece 1766–1976, Oxford:
Mahaira, E. (1987), Η νεολαία της Τετάρτης Αυγούστου, Athens: Istoriko Arheio

Ellinikis Neolaias.
Metaxas, I. (1969), Λόγοι και σκέψεις, 1936–1941, 2 vols, Athens: Ikaros.
Miller, W. (1934), ‘Book review of La Grèce actuelle’, Journal of Modern History VI:
370–71.
Nelly’s (1989), Αυτοπροσωπογραφία, E.H. Kasdaglis (ed.), Athens: n.p.
Nelly’s (1997), Σώμα και χορός, Athens: Agra and Ammos.
Papaioannou, I. (2005), ‘Η φωτογραφία του ελληνικού τοπίου – Ιδεολογία και
αισθητική’, unpublished dissertation, Aristoteleio Panepistimio Thessalonikis.
Peltre, C. (2011), Le voyage de Grèce: un atelier en Méditerranée, Paris: Citadelles &
Mazenod.
Petrakis, M. (2006), The Metaxas Myth: Dictatorship and Propaganda in Greece,
London: Tauris Academic Studies.
Savvakis, A. (1996), ‘Εξιδανικεύοντας την Ελλάδα. Η ζωή και το έργο της
Μικρασιάτισσας Έλλης Σουγιουλτζόγλου-Σεραϊδάρη’, in E. Traiou (ed.),
‘Η Ελλάδα με το φακό της Nelly’s’, Kathimerini, Epta Imeres (30 June): 2–3.
Seferis, G. (1980), Χειρόγραφο Σεπ. ’41, Athens: Ikaros.
Silver, K.E. (2010), Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918–
1936, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Sontag, S. (1972), Under the Sign of Saturn, London: Penguin Books.
Sontag, S. (1979), On Photography, London: Penguin Books.
Sontag, S. (2003), ‘Photography within the Humanities’, in L. Wells (ed.), The
Photography Reader, New York and London: Routledge, 59–66.
Stevenson, B.E. (1948), The Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Familiar Phrases,
New York: Macmillan Co.
Trichon-Milsani, E. (1990), ‘Nelly, μια ελληνίδα φωτογράφος’, in D. Fotopoulos
(ed.), Nelly’s, Athens: Agrotiki Trapeza tis Ellados, 41–9.
Waterton, E. and S. Watson (eds) (2010), Culture, Heritage and Representation,
Farnham: Ashgate.
Xanthakis, A. (1990), ‘Nelly’s, μια ιστορική αναδρομή’, in D. Fotopoulos (ed.),
Nelly’s, Athens: Agrotiki Trapeza tis Ellados, 25–9.
Xanthakis, A. (1996), ‘Πρωτοπόρος φωτογράφος’, in E. Traiou (ed.), ‘Η Ελλάδα με
το φακό της Nelly’s’, Kathimerini, Epta Imeres (30 June): 28–31.
Papyros.
Yalouri, E. (2001), The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim, Oxford: Berg.
Zacharia, K. (2014), ‘Postcards from Metaxas’ Greece: The Uses of Classical

Antiquity in Tourist Photographs’, in D. Tziovas (ed.), Re-imagining the Past:
Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 186–
208.
12
War Photographs Re-used:

An Approach to the Photograph Collection
of the Memorial Museum of the
Battle of Sarandaporo
Eleni Kouki
This chapter calls attention to the collection of war photographs of the Balkan Wars
period created for the museum of the Battle of Sarandaporo, one of the numerous
military museums established during the junta years (1967–74). Its first aim
is to present an important stage in the production of military history in Greece,
connecting it with the political agenda of the dictatorship, which dictated this
process. The second, and perhaps more important, aim is to examine these old war
photos in order to raise a wider question regarding how photography came to acquire
historical value. Until the junta began to stage historical military exhibitions, old war
photographs rarely appeared in the Greek public arena. Thus, their re-appearance as
museum exhibits must not be taken for granted. Even though today the importance
of photography for the recording of the past in general, and especially for the
recording of important historical events, such as wars, is widely acknowledged, we
have to wonder whether photography has always been appreciated as the proper
medium to immortalise significant events. To answer this question, I seek to detect
the social meaning of war photographs in Greece, examining a long period of the
twentieth century, from the Balkan Wars (1912–13) up to the junta, in an attempt
to substantiate the main thesis of this chapter, namely that the historical value of
photography has been acknowledged through a complex cultural process.
The term ‘war photography’ is used here in the broadest sense. Apart from
pictures of combat, I also mean photographs which depict preparation for war,
the daily routine of the soldiers, landscapes of the battle zone, civilians caught
in the middle of conflicts, images of ‘the home front’ and every other picture
that communicates the multidimensional war experience. War photographs are
not necessarily ordered and shot by the military. On the contrary, many iconic
257
photographs were shot by photo-journalists. However, in order for a war to be

covered photographically, the permission of military authorities is essential;
otherwise, the front line remains inaccessible. Finally, it must be noted that not
only professionals photograph wars. Any soldier and official holding a camera
can capture aspects of a war and, indeed, they do so. These photos are rarely
displayed in public, but they fashion the way war experience is remembered in
private settings.
The Hatzigogos Inn in Sarandaporo lies on a peaceful road which links central
Greece with northern Greece. At the beginning of the 1960s, the road had lost
its significance because of the construction of a new motorway. For centuries,
however, it had been the main passage linking Thessaly with Macedonia. This is
where the Greek army passed in October 1912, after the First Balkan War began,
and along it some of the first battles of that war were fought. The old inn had
been converted into the headquarters of the Greek forces several days before the
battle of Sarandaporo (8–12 October 1912), which ended victoriously for the
Greek army, allowing it to proceed to Macedonia.
In 1972 these memories were brought to light with the construction of a war
memorial museum which incorporated the old inn. The museum comprises both
the old building and a new one which houses the central and most impressive
exhibit, a three-dimensional geophysical map of the region, which, with the aid
of audio-visual equipment, represents the strategic deployment of the Greek and
Ottoman armies in the Sarandaporo battle. Military uniforms and weaponry are
on display. Also included in the exhibits are 55 old photographs displayed in both
the old and new building, creating a narrative thread between them.
In this photographic collection, one finds all the usual topics of war
photographs of the Balkan Wars period: leaders’ portraits, snapshots of battles
(staged or genuine), photographs of military everyday life, marches, rest stops,
technical achievements (the construction of bridges, for example) and landscapes
of the territories through which the army advanced or photos depicting the
defeat of the enemy, such as the photo of a battlefield covered with corpses. In
short, the collection exemplifies the efforts and sacrifices of the Greek army and
visualises its triumph.
Moreover, these photos constitute a non-verbal account of the battle’s wider
significance. Except for short captions, no further explanatory text is available at the
museum, apparently because it was deemed unnecessary. Thus, the photos could be
said to function as ‘authentic contemporary documents’, as the famous American
photographer Robert Frank put it (Sontag 1979: 111), that is, documents whose
visual impact is such as to ‘nullify explanation’; or, as Roland Barthes (1968) would
put it, details which create the ‘reality effect’.
Displaying old photos after so many decades, that is, re-using them as
exhibits, inevitably invests them with new meanings. I will present two examples.
The first is a powerful photograph depicting several brutally amputated soldiers
lying on the stretchers of an impromptu rudimentary hospital (Fig. 12.1). The
unknown photographer shot his ‘subject’ directly, obviously wanting to capture
War photographs re-used 259
Figure 12.1 Unknown photographer, Transportation of injured at the Battle of

Sarandaporo out of Elassona, c. 1912–1913
Source: Museum of the Battle of Sarandaporo; no copyright permission required
the disfigured appearance of these men. What is most interesting about it is

that it does not look like any other photograph of the period with the same
subject. Photographs depicting wounded soldiers nursed in military hospitals
were common; however, they were carefully composed to highlight the ability
of the army to provide care for its soldiers, which is why they never showed
extremely graphic and shocking details. In this photograph, the wounded
would certainly have provoked concerns among viewers of how the lives of
these men would have been affected after the war. For this reason it was not a
suitable photograph to be displayed publicly during or immediately after the
Balkan Wars; it would have created mixed feelings with regard to the national
effort. Since it has no propagandistic value, we can assume that it was taken by
an amateur, possibly someone from the hospital staff and was kept in a personal
photo album. But 60 years later, it is chosen as one of the museum’s exhibits
to illustrate the battle. One can, therefore, assume that the soldiers’ piteous
appearance is no longer perceived as a handicap for a ‘proper national picture’;
rather, it is appreciated as proof of the sacrifice of these men who forfeited a
normal life for their fatherland, and one can even infer that it was intended to
impose a moral obligation on ‘future generations’.
Figure 12.2 Unknown photographer, The minaret from where the imam was
shooting at the Greek army as it entered the city, 1912–1913
Source: Archive of Photographs, War Museum, Athens
Is this interpretation correct? Is the museum’s aim to stir up nationalist

passions among its visitors? Or is this a biased interpretation drawn from the
fact that the collection was assembled during the junta, a period of excessive
nationalist rhetoric (Clogg 1972)? The most difficult part when examining old
photos is to identify their meaning, which is ever-changing through time, as
meaning lies not only in what is depicted in the photograph, but also in the
particular social context which fashions a way to look at photographs. Given
the fact that we rarely have a tangible indication as to the responses of the
viewer or the deepest intentions of the officials who designed the museum, we
can never be sure. Nevertheless, we can reconstruct the social framework of
these photographs by examining small details associated with them, such as
captions.
In the second photograph (Fig. 12.2), the meaning has been deliberately
changed. It is a photo of a mosque in Elassona. Just before its annexation to the
Greek state, Elassona had five mosques, four of which were later demolished.1 Its
caption informs us that this is the minaret from where the imam was shooting at
the Greek army as it entered the city. Indeed, as we learn from newspaper accounts
of the time (Embros, 12 October 1912: 2; and 28 November 1912: 2), after the
Ottoman army had withdrawn from the city, an imam kept on firing without,
however, posing any threat to the Greek army (Dimitrakopoulos 1992: 32). The
published articles make the imam seem ridiculous with his stubborn and unrealistic
behaviour. The caption of the photograph, however, implies that the Greek army
was in danger, underlining the ‘devious’ nature of the enemy. Sixty years later,
instead of serving as a document of the pre-war city, the photo focuses on the
depiction of a hostile monument still threatening the Greek viewers, although
demolished decades before.
From these two examples, one can understand the ways in which the museum
attempts to evoke nationalistic sentiments among visitors through ‘visual
shocks’. Indeed, these new memorial museums represent a new perception of
how a national memorial should address the people. In order to understand how
this collection of photographs was built up, one must trace not only how the
memorial museum of Sarandaporo was created, but also the wider strategy of
forging military history initiated by the junta.
The fervour for military history
From the first days of the 1967 coup, the army was depicted as the most valuable
national asset. Apart from its political significance as the saviour of the nation
from the communist threat, it was presented as a benevolent force that comes to
the people’s aid when they suffer, for example, natural disasters and as a prominent
segment of the body politic bringing progress to remote areas of the nation
(Makedonia, 10 May 1967: 5; and 11 May 1967: 3). Moreover, in 1968, a large
exhibition entitled ‘Exhibition of the War History of the Greeks’ presented the
army as the core of the nation through its entire history, from the prehistoric era
to that of the junta. As one learns from the speech delivered at its opening, the
aim of the exhibition was to form the nucleus of a future war museum in Athens
(Headquarters of the Armed Forces 1970: 7).
Of course, this military exhibition exploited the prestige of archaeology,
which is considered the ‘national science’ in Greece (Mazower 2008: 33), but
this was not enough. New types of exhibits had to be invented because typical
exhibits of an archaeological museum were not relevant to the military theme
of the exhibition. Although, wherever it was possible, the exhibition comprised
original archaeological objects, it mainly relied on copies, reproductions of military
engines and representations of major military events not only by traditional means
1
http://www.elassona.com.gr/m_elassona/istoria/index.php (accessed 27 August
2012).
(paintings, for instance), but also through maps and other visual displays. The
result was less than authentic, but it would certainly appeal to visitors as pageantry
or as a ‘special effects’ film (Embros, 27 April 1968: 5).
Following the exhibition, a fervour for military history hit the country.
The construction process of the Athens War Museum (AWM) began in 1969
(Legislative decree 132/1969), but it was not completed until 1974. As a result,
this project, symbolic of the new military ideology, was finally inaugurated in
1975, after the transition to democratic rule. In the provinces, however, many
military museums on a smaller scale were created in Lahanas, Kilkis, Kalpaki and
Sarandaporo, commemorating important twentieth-century battles.2 Although
the AWM was not ready yet to open to the public, it must have played some
role in the formation of the provincial military museums’ collections. The most
indicative example is the museum of Sarandaporo, the collection of which
was entirely composed of exhibits belonging to the AWM.3 Still, there is no
information about the provenance of the photographs displayed at Sarandaporo,
apparently because none of them were original; they were all copies, and,
therefore, there was no need to keep a record of them. However, we have many
indications that these too must have been reproduced from the photographic
archive of the AWM as, except for three, all the other 52 photographs of the
Sarandaporo collection can be also found in the catalogue of the photographic
archive of the AWM with similar, or in many cases, identical captions and, more
importantly, with the same initial mistakes in their identification. One cannot
know why those three pictures do not also appear in the AWM’s photographical
archive; two of them are very common: the first is a snapshot of a firing canon,
and the second is a team portrait of four officers. The third is the powerful picture
of the amputated soldiers I described earlier. Perhaps they belonged to someone
involved in the construction of the Sarandaporo Museum, who gave them to
be copied for the latter but not the AWM. Nonetheless, the most significant
element of the comparison between the two museums’ photographic collections
is not these three photos but the other 52, which prove the affinity between the
two foundations.
The development of military museums in the provinces seems to have been
the result of initiatives taken by the local military authorities, but the striking
resemblances among them indicate that the actual process of establishing them
must have been the result of an overarching policy. All of them share similar
features: they are close to a battlefield; if there are old buildings remaining from
the war, they are incorporated into the museum complex; and they contain the
2
The common procedure in Greece for a museum to be founded is that a decree must be issued,
published in the first series of the Government Gazette. A striking exception in this rule during the junta
era is the founding of military museums, about which one cannot trace any decree, perhaps because they
were not considered independent foundations, but units of military compounds.
3
According to information that was provided both by the AWM and the museum at
Sarandaporo. Unfortunately, I was not given permission to access the pertinent documents.
same audio-visual material. These museums are of local importance (indicatively,

their construction does not concern newspapers with state-wide circulation such
as Makedonia), but, at the same time, they seem to have been of great importance
for the members of the ‘revolutionary government’. For example, in the case of
the Sarandaporo Museum, we know that at least two major figures of the military
junta, Stylianos Pattakos and Ioannis Ladas, intervened in its establishment
(I Mikra tis Elassonos, 5 August 1971: 2; and 21 August 1971: 1). The first
insisted that the prefecture of Larissa undertake the reconstruction of the old
Hatzigogos Inn, while the second interceded to send an engineering platoon for
the construction of the museum.
In order to understand the meaning of the war photos displayed in the new
military museums, one must consider their use, or, to be more specific, their lack
of use, before the establishment of the museums. As I argue, before the ‘military
history campaign’ was set in motion, old war photos in Greece had almost vanished
from public view. They did not appear in books, nor were they used as illustrations
in the Press. Consequently, the essential question must be how photography came
to be accepted as a museum exhibit. Nowadays, this seems obvious, but reviewing
the period between the Balkan Wars and the first decades after WWII, it becomes
clear that photography at the time did not have the same ‘historical value’ in
Greece as it does today.
From the Balkan Wars to the post-WWII period
The Balkan Wars have been described as the ‘apotheosis of realistic war
photography’ (Xanthakis 2008: 241). Technological developments, especially the
release of the folding camera, such as the vest pocket Kodak, enabled not only
professional photographers but also amateurs to take pictures and capture their
own experiences from the war. These war snapshots mark the emergence of a
new photographic perception, radically different from the previous tradition of
professional staged photography. However accurate this description might be, the
question remains: what was the significance of photography in Greece at the time?
In order to answer such a question, I examine the uses of photography in parallel
with the uses of other kinds of visual representation. For, apart from photographs,
the Balkan Wars increased the need for pictures in general, such as maps and
paintings. Advertisements in the newspapers of the time reveal this quite novel
and growing demand on the part of the citizens who wanted to have a map of
the country’s new territories in their homes or a picture of a battle, that is to say,
a tangible visualisation of the national triumph in their everyday life (Embros, 9
November 1912: 2).
Furthermore, one assumes that newspapers also must have augmented their
needs for illustration. Nowadays, photography seems to be the most appropriate
mode of journalistic illustration with its capacity for precise visual documentation.
But back then there were significant limitations that prevented war photos from
keeping up with the war news, such as the slow transportation of the photographs
from the battlefront to the newspaper offices or severe censorship especially at
the beginning of the war, which allowed very few pictures to circulate. Only in
time did the authorities acknowledge the propagandistic value of war photos and
permitted – even encouraged – photographic coverage of the events, especially
from the Battle of Bizani onwards (Xanthakis 2008: 249).
On the other hand, painting in all its forms maintained its advantage over
photography. It could create pictures with a wider meaning, in contrast to

photography which only provides a fragmentary perspective of the world,
insufficient to present the significance of an event or deliver a moral lesson. For
this reason, painted pictures endured after the war even though the painter and
the photographer often worked side by side in wartime; for example, Thaleia
Flora-Karavia, a painter who followed the Greek army and portrayed the war
effort, sketched her drawings often with the aid of photos. Even though she
depicts the same theme as contemporary war photographers, her drawings are
more than a document: they raise ethical issues and create poignant moments.
After an exhibition of her drawings in 1913, a columnist of the Embros newspaper
(27 April 1913: 1), commenting on her sketches of prisoners of war, concluded
that her works represent the mental condition of the war prisoner. To date I have
not found a similar analysis of a war photograph, apparently because photography,
unlike painting, was appreciated as a mode of merely depicting the ‘physical’
elements of war. In the interwar period, drawings of Flora-Karavia continued to be
shown in public; in 1936, for example, she published her Impressions from the War
of 1912–1913. Macedonia, Epirus. The low social importance of war photography
can also be deduced by the way it is described in the Great Military and Naval
Encyclopaedia, a publication authorised by the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The
entry ‘photography’, written in the 1920s, restricts it exclusively to its technical
uses, such as aerial reconnaissance photography (Nobelis 1930: 539–40).
In conclusion, although during the Balkan Wars one can notice a new public
interest in war photos and consequently a new awareness on the part of the military
that photography had significant propagandistic value, after the Balkan Wars, when
these photographs had become outdated, there is no indication of a need for their
preservation or dissemination. This is quite obvious in the case of publications.
The index of Greek bibliography on photography (Yannitsiou and Leivana 2000)
reveals that although during or right after the war, some publications of war photos
were released, such as the Panorama of the 1912–1913 War, published soon after
the end of the Balkan Wars (Spandonis 2002), it seems that this trend ceased
in the interwar period. This may have happened for several reasons. It may be
that the multiple war expeditions in which the country was engaged in after the
Balkan Wars, especially the disastrous Asia Minor campaign, left little desire for
the longevity of war pictures in the Greek public arena. But, again, we must take
into account that, unlike photography, paintings from the Balkan Wars, such as
those of Flora-Karavia, continued to be reproduced. This is why I argue that during
this period, photography in Greece had still a low social importance, and it was
more appreciated for its ability to describe accurately the physical nature of war,
but not as a medium for immortalising great historical events.
On the contrary, war photos from this period have an important significance
in private settings. Many of the pictures shot at the time were intended to serve
as personal keepsakes, and after the war they were stored in family photo-albums.
We know that some professional photographers, who followed the army, even made
money out of selling their photos to soldiers, especially officers (Vlahos 2002: 10).
These photos became valuable items in family albums. In one of these, the following
note was written: ‘The photos you are going to see are not artistic, but for me they are
sweet memories of a glorious and beautiful era, though filled with sorrow and danger’
(Xanthakis 2008: 246).
WWII was the decisive moment for war photography and photojournalism, in
particular, which gained a new legitimacy (Sontag 2002: 88). This has to do with
major developments during the interwar period, especially the establishment and
maturing of magazine journalism; however, it cannot be a mere coincidence that
the iconic photos of this period, like the ‘Child with a rice ball’ by Yamahata Yosuke
or the ‘American flag raised in Iwo Jima’ by Joe Rosenthal, combine documentary
virtues with the ability to narrate a more encompassing story, to transmit emotions,
to mark out sensitive moral issues.
In Greece, too, WWII is a period during which significant photographic work
was created, but it did not change the established perception of the historical value of
war photography in the country. It is very indicative that in 1963 when the periodical
Elliniki Fotografia made a first attempt to describe the history of Greek photography,
war photography is completely ignored (Papakyriakou 1963: 11). When it comes to
the 1940s, it is stated that the decade ‘does not present any interest or any evolution
because of the Occupation and the abnormal situation’. Although the silence
surrounding the work of left-wing photographers like Spyros Meletzis could be easily
explained, it still remains noteworthy that this statement also undervalues the work
of photographers such as Voula Papaioannou or Dimitris Harissiadis. Eventually,
the new status of photo-journalism abroad influenced Greece. Thus, in 1969, when
the junta decided to circulate a postage stamp for the twentieth anniversary of the
‘Victory in Grammos-Vitsi’, in other words the victory of the National Army in the
civil war, the illustration on the stamp was an imitation of the famous Rosenthal
photo from Iwo Jima mentioned above (Pylarinos 1982: 135). This re-evaluation of
war photos is a multi-faceted process which I will try to illuminate bellow.
First of all, we must remember that the post-WWII period is characterised
by the apparent expansion of photography in Greece. Reading satirical columns
(Embros, 27 January 1952: 3) describing the blunders of ignorant villagers who arrive
in Athens every Sunday to be photographed with their wives, we can understand
that ever wider social strata were becoming familiar with photography, albeit with
difficulty. Furthermore, photography was becoming an indispensable tool for a
variety of activities and agents: for a politician who ran an election campaign, for a
young man who wanted to be a film star, for a mother who wanted her baby to win
the contest for ‘the prettiest and wealthiest child in the nation’ (Embros, 12 June
1952: 2; 6 January 1953: 5; and 9 September 1952: 4, respectively). During this

period, the coverage of photos in the newspapers increased significantly: in 1920
the proportion of photographic image to text was a mere 2 per cent, whereas by
1960 it had reached 9 per cent (Elliniki Fotografia 21 (1960): 18).
The founding of the Greek Photographic Society (EFE) in 1952 and the
ensuing publication of its periodical Elliniki Fotografia is another step in this new
intimate relationship between the Greek public and photography. The EFE began
to organise frequent photographic exhibitions and, through a firm editorial policy,

sought to highlight the value of Greek photography. In the first years of its existence,
the argument it sought to advance is that if Greek tourism is to be promoted by
its own – that is Greek – agency, reliance on the work of foreign photographers
needed to end and Greek photography must be developed instead. The periodical
systematically covered advances in technological matters and expressed the spirit
of a new photographic era. The past was considered a period of backwardness and
merely served as the background against which contemporary Greek photography
was set out. In such a context, there was no space for retrospection. What is more,
the periodical supported artistic photography, which appeared as the opposite of
commemorative photography. In order to establish beyond any doubt the superiority
of artistic photography, it went one step further by presenting the thoughts of Walter
Benjamin on photography in 1963 (Kallivokas 1963: 33–4), perhaps the earliest
appearance of Benjamin’s work in Greece. It is obvious that though the author was
not generally acquainted with Benjamin’s theory, he was intrigued by his view that
photography declined when the bourgeois family photograph album began to fill up
(Benjamin 1978: 55–6).To sum up, it can be easily explained why even after WWII,
when photography had conquered so many fields of everyday life in Greece, there
were obstacles preventing old photography from acquiring historical status. Firstly,
the new dominance of photography was related to a futuristic spirit – photography
was admired for its technological advances. Secondly, the distinction between
art-photography and commemorative photography was still very powerful, the latter
being considered dispensable, with no lasting value. Thus, we can assume that the old
war photos with their naive compositions could not be appreciated, even though they
carried a wealth of information about times past.
Meanwhile, developments abroad introduced new perceptions on photography.
The fame of photojournalists, a new extraordinary group of people leading exotic,
exciting lives reached Greece (Embros, 17 December 1955: 6). Gradually a new idea
was established, that photojournalism creates pictures that are worth keeping hold
of, thus becoming historical. This new idea, though born in western metropolises,
such as New York or Paris, was disseminated internationally in many ways. One of
the most effective was the great exhibition entitled The Family of Man, curated by
Edward Steichen.4 The main aim of the exhibition, which comprised 503 photographs
– selected from almost two million – by 273 photographers from 68 countries, was to
explore the ‘essence’ of man, common in every corner of the globe. For such a task,
4
Official website at: http://www.family-of-man.public.lu (accessed 8 August 2013).
photography was preferred as the most suitable medium because of its ability to carry
information beyond language barriers, which prevents people from understanding
each other and could create confusion and prejudice. After the first exhibition at the
MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art) in New York in 1955, the exhibition went on
a worldwide tour including Greece, but even before arriving in Greece, its fame had
already taken hold of the population (Embros, 28 July 1956: 12). The concept of the
silent power of photography that cuts through bias and unites people must have been
disseminated to inform similar projects. An exhibition, for instance, was held across
Europe – but with a more focused theme ‘The family of Europeans’ in which the
Greek photographer D. Harissiadis participated (having already taken part in the
Steichen exhibition).5 Initially, the exhibition was inaugurated in Germany, but after
an appeal by the curator to the Council of Europe, the exhibition was adopted by the
organisation in 1961, and thus it was presented in many European cities. Perhaps
the two exhibitions seem irrelevant to old war photos which, after all, were in most
cases naive snapshots with no artistic value compared to the masterpieces of Henri
Cartier-Bresson and Frank Capa displayed at these exhibitions. However, I mention
them since they were central to establishing the relatively new idea that photography
is the proper medium to communicate higher values because of its non-linguistic
expressiveness, and also because they promoted a new approach to the public display
of photographs, one that relates to the family photo-album.
In addition, in 1961 the Council of Europe inaugurated a campaign for the
recognition of photography as a means of education, communication among the
nations and preservation of the national and world heritage. The sixth article of
the declaration with which the campaign was launched states that photography
‘contributes to the faithful preservation of written testimonies and enriches the
national and world heritage’ (Papakyriakou 1961). Henceforth, the EFE invoked
the new status of photography whenever it complained about government policies,
especially the imposition of high taxes on photography.
This does not mean that there was a new interest in old photos, but rather that
Greek photographers had now realised that their medium was also a means of
recording and preserving the future history of their country. In the same period,
old photos appeared very rarely in the press and, when they did, they were portraits
of influential figures in the political life of the nation, such as the royal couple.
Thus, it does not come as a surprise that when old photos were needed for the
setting up of the ‘Exhibition of the War History of the Greeks’, there were no
collections that could provide them. Unlike other war museums abroad, which
inherited vast collections of official war photographs depicting various aspects
of the war, the photographic material for the exhibition was gathered from
non-official sources. According to one testimony, a large section of the material
was secured due to purchases from photojournalists such as Apostolos Ververis.6
5
Electronic archives of the Council of Europe, http://128.121.10.98/coe/main.
jsp?flag=browse&smd=1&awdid=9 (accessed on 18 November 2011).
6
Information provided by the historian of the AWM, Varvara Balabaneri.
Figure 12.3 Unknown photographer, Peasant women bid farewell to their

husbands leaving for the front, c. 1912–1913
This first source of photographic material is hardly surprising considering the

prestige that photojournalism had gained at the time. Meanwhile, a campaign to
concentrate photographic material from citizens began. And when the ‘Exhibition
of the War History of the Greeks’ closed and all the exhibits were transferred to
the newly-established war museum, the campaign to gather photographic material
continued under the auspices of the new museum. Army officers, in particular,
were keen to donate personal keepsakes. Today, in the photographic archive of the
AWM, one sees albums with titles that evoke dedications which could be found
in a family album – like the one made by Stavros Metaxas, a reserve officer who
donated his photographic archive ‘as a souvenir to his colleagues’ (Photographic
Archive of the AWM). Thus, family albums became national photo albums.
Composing the national photo-album
The concept of the photo album has been employed recently to explain the way
photojournalism influences widely diverse, mass audiences (Morris-Suzuki 2005:
82–9). The family photo album is an important medium through which people have
Figure 12. 4 Unknown photographer, The return from the war, c. 1912–1913
become familiar with the act of looking at photographs. In this sense, photo albums
are re-evaluated; instead of being judged for their conformity and lack of originality,
they are regarded as narrative frameworks within which individual photos acquire their
meaning. Thus, when we stare at the ‘Child with the rice ball’ we are intrigued because
we can observe a child rescued from the nuclear explosion in Nagasaki, which is the
journalistic value of the photo, but, more importantly, we are deeply touched by the
portrait of a young boy with whom we can identify ourselves because it is like seeing
our child, our nephew, ourselves even, at a younger age, in a family photo album.
Examining the way war photograph collections were created, we can find the
same logic of the family album, although with a difference, because in the case of the
memorial museum in Sarandaporo, as well as in other military museums, the photo
album which is presented is that of the nation-family. Two photos, in particular, from
the Sarandaporo collection allow the emotional identification of the viewer with the
nation-family: in the first, peasant women bid farewell to their husbands leaving for
the front (Fig. 12.3), and, in the second, a son embraces his mother after the end of
the war and his victorious return (Fig. 12.4).
Figure 12.5 Unknown photographer, King Constantine helping an injured

soldier onto his car, c. 1912–1913
Nineteen sixty-eight was a crucial year for the junta ruling the country. On 12
December 1967, the royal counter-coup had proved beyond any doubt that the
dictatorship was not supported by the king. There was an urgent need for a legitimising
narrative that would present the army in its new independent dominance. An exhibition
that would identify the entire historical course of the nation with its martial exploits
could construct this new perception of the primacy of the military element within
the nation. Such exhibitions needed to be exciting, vivid and persuasive at first sight.
By then, photography had been recognised as important exhibition material. During
the 1950s and 1960s, photography had been re-evaluated internationally because
of its ability to engage its audience, bypassing the language barrier. In this context,
we can understand better the words of Robert Frank: ‘We produce an authentic
contemporary document, when its impact is such as will nullify explanation’. In the
aftermath of WWII, this photographic virtue was considered capable of building
bridges of reconciliation among nations after the trauma of war but, as we can see, in
later years this axiom was used for very different purposes – in our case by a military
government seeking definitively to legitimise its nationalist vision.
Nevertheless, all this visual material which flowed back to the surface proved
to be profoundly strange. The curators who undertook to identify and classify it
knew very little about what these photos represented. At first, in the ‘Exhibition
of the War History of the Greeks’ the task was easier because they had to
create larger units, such as a general overview of the war of 1913, for instance.
But the project of designing an exhibition centred on a specific event, that is,
Figure 12. 6 Unknown photographer, The assembling of the Greek army in

Larisa, c. 1912–1913
the battle of Sarandaporo, was more complex. This explains why, finally, the
museum’s collection contains at least 17 photos which are mistakenly identified
as depicting the battle. These images are also held in the photographic archives of
the AWM where they were also initially identified as deriving from Sarandaporo
or from the Balkan Wars, but later the errors were corrected. If the material in
the museum’s archive is examined more closely, it is probable that many more
mistakenly identified photos will be uncovered.
Of course the collection of the Sarandaporo Museum also contains photos that
do not derive from the specific battle, such as portraits of leaders or important events
that characterise the whole period (such as the funeral of King George I in March
1913). Furthermore, it is understandable that the curators of the exhibition used
photos that exemplify military innovations of the period not always strictly related
with the battle of Sarandaporo, such as photos of the newly founded Greek air force.
The problem lies in that the photos that supposedly depict the battle or aspects of it
(soldiers’s everyday life, wounded soldiers, prisoners of war and officers giving orders)
are not from Sarandaporo. The majority of mistakenly identified photos come from
other battles of the same period. If curators were aware that these photos were of
uncertain provenance, could the reason why they decided to exhibit them without
any clarification in the captions be their conviction that a picture of soldiers’s everyday
life from another battle of the Balkan Wars would also depict the circumstances at
Sarandaporo? However, I believe that the main factor was the curators’s ignorance;
otherwise, one cannot explain why they also included photos of well-known people,
even a picture of King Constantine (who at the time was still heir to the throne)
helping an injured soldier onto his car. All the while it was known that this incident
is known to have happened in Epirus (Fig. 12.5). Moreover, apart from photos from
the other fronts of the Balkan Wars, the collection also comprises material from the
Asia Minor campaign and even the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (Fig. 12.6). One
picture may even date from WWII. Upon thorough examination, this collection,
which is intended to evoke the experience of the Battle of Sarandaporo, proves to be
profoundly misleading. The ‘reality effect’ is not real at all.
In 1974 the AWM began to register the photographic archive material
at hand. Since then, there have been successive revisions. We can have a
general picture of the extent of the corrections made due to the fact that the
initial classifications have been maintained. Furthermore, as they entered
revisions onto the old index-cards, we can see how the younger archivists
were astonished at the ignorance of their predecessors. Sometimes, they even
express some sort of disapproval by noting down deprecating comments or
textual symbols such as exclamation marks. The new archivists had become
so familiar with the old photos that they were unable to appreciate the fact
that this familiarisation had been established quite recently. As the old photos
re-entered the public arena and became part of historical culture, the fact that
in the late 1960s and at the beginning of the 1970s old photos were rather
novel material which created confusion and misunderstanding, was erased
from memory. Finally, the AWM was able to amend at least the most serious
inaccuracies and properly date most of the photos. But the provincial military
museums, deficient in the infrastructure that would allow them to conduct such
revisions, preserved their collections in their original form. In July 1974 the
junta collapsed and, consequently, the museums lost their prevalence as places
where the army’s authority was manifested. However, they were not closed down,
despite occasional protests. They kept a low profile, addressing mostly military
audiences and maintaining the right to depict the nation’s martial history. Today
they stand as ‘testimonies’ of the period in which people first became familiar
with old war photos.
Conclusion
This chapter has dealt with the evolution of photography’s social meaning and
uses in Greece. Some developments described here were only particularities
of Greek society, while others concern European or international platforms.
The starting point was the observation that before the junta years, old photos
from the Balkan Wars did not appear often in the public arena, leading me to
maintain that pre-1967 old war photos were not valued as historical evidence in
the way they are today. There are two questions which need addressing. Firstly, if
old photos did not have the same social meaning then as today, what was their
meaning when they were taken? And, secondly, how has their social meaning
changed through time? I have argued that the acceptance of photography as a
way of ‘portraying history’ is not a natural, self-evident procedure due to some
supposedly inherent quality of photography as the medium which depicts reality

accurately. On the contrary, it is the outcome of a complicated cultural process.
A further examination of the use and dissemination of old war photos
between 1913, the end of the Balkan Wars, and 1967, led me to two conclusions.
The first is that the perceptions over the historical value of old photos changed
because of WWII. The second conclusion is that prior to WWII, painting still
had the precedence as the medium for visualising history – at least in Greece.
I suggest that the shifting of mentalities about photography after WWII has
not only to do with developments such as the acceleration of urbanisation
and the restarting of the economy, although these factors, of course, are also
very important. As I have sought to show, the re-evaluation of photography
is connected with the rising of a new perception about its mute power as a
medium that can transmit knowledge and spread understanding by overcoming
the language barrier. This perception derives directly from the efforts of the
post-war world for rehabilitation and the building of new bonds among
nations. In this chapter I tried to show how this axiom about the mute force of
photography was finally transmuted and used for very different purposes, for
instance, the glorification of the junta.
This is why the case of the Sarantaporo Museum’s photographic collection
is interesting; it allows us to investigate these major cultural shifts from a
peripheral point of view which nonetheless reveals a lot about the social history
of photography in Greece.
References
Barthes, R. (1968), ‘L’effet de réel’, Communications 11: 84–9.

Benjamin, W. (1999), Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, Cambridge, MA and
London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Clogg, R. (1972), ‘The Ideology of the “Revolution of 21 April 1967”’, R. Clogg
and G. Yannopoulos (eds), Greece Under Military Rule, London: Secker and
Warburg, 36–58.
Dimitrakopoulos, A. (1992), Ο Πρώτος Βαλκανικός Πόλεμος μέσα από τις σελίδες
του περιοδικού, L’Illustration, Athens: Elliniki Epitropi Stratiotikis Istorias.
Flora-Karavia, T. (1936), Εντυπώσεις από τον πόλεμο του 1912–1913: Μακεδονία-
Ήπειρος, Αθήνα: n.p.
Headquarters of the Armed Forces (1970), Έκθεσις της πολεμικής ιστορίας των
Ελλήνων, vol. I, Athens: Ekdotiki Ellados.
Kallivokas, D. (1963), ‘Η φωτογραφία από τη σκοπιά της κοινωνιολογίας της
τέχνης’, Elliniki Fotografia 32: 33–4.
Mazower, M. (2008), ‘Archaeology, Nationalism and the Land in Modern Greece’,
in D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and
Hellenic Identity in Twentieth-Century Greece, Athens: Benaki Museum, 33–41.
Morris-Suzuki, T. (2005), The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, London:
Verso.
Nobelis, Z. (1930), ‘Φωτογραφία’, Μεγάλη Στρατιωτική και Ναυτική Εγκυκλοπαίδεια,
vol. VI, Athens: 539–40.
Papakyriakou, K. (1961), ‘Διεθνής φωτογραφική κίνησις’, Elliniki Fotografia 25:
34–5.
Papakyriakou, K. (1963), ‘Η ιστορία της φωτογραφίας εν Ελλάδι’, Elliniki Fotografia
32: 11, 32.
Pylarinos (ed.) (1982), Ελλάς Κύπρος Europa Cept ΟΗΕ United Nations, Athens:
Pylarinos.
Sontag, S. (1979), On Photography, London: Penguin.
Sontag, S. (2002), ‘Looking at War’, New Yorker (9 December): 82–98.
Spandonis, N. (2002), Πανόραμα του πολέμου 1912–1913, Athens: Patakis.
Vlahos, K. (2002), Η απελευθέρωση της Ηπείρου: Α΄ Βαλκανικός Πόλεμος (1912–
1913): φωτογραφικό λεύκωμα, Preveza: Idryma Aktia Nikopolis.
Papyros.
Yiannitsiou, E. and G. Leivana (2000), Ελληνική βιβλιογραφία για τη φωτογραφία
(1893–1996), Athens: Elliniko Kentro Fotografias.
Part IV
Photographic Ethnographies:
The Dispersal of Photographic Objects
275

13
From ‘Here and Now’ to ‘Then and There’:

Reflections on
Fieldwork Photography in the 1960s1
Margaret E. Kenna
Photographs which I have taken in Greece over the past 45 or so years are
currently being donated to the Benaki Museum Photographic Archive in Athens.
The majority of these photos relate to research carried out on the Cycladic island of
Anafi and among island migrants in Athens. Preparing to make this donation has
prompted a consideration of the role of photographs as social and cultural records
(see Caplan 2010). Banks and Vokes (2010: 340) refer to Barthes’s discussion of
the photograph as establishing ‘a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and
temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the
here-now and the there-then’ (Barthes 1977: 44). What was contemporary in the
1960s, and is now in the past, gains a new ‘here and now-ness’ when subjected
to the processes described in this paper: processes of re-interrogation and
re-interpretation inspired by discussions with islanders and migrants and by
reflexive introspection.
In May 1966, I began fieldwork on Anafi (12 miles, or 20 kilometres, east
of Santorini), a Cycladic island with a small harbour and one village, and with a
population at that time of under 300 people.2 The original research topic, inter-
island links, was soon replaced by a study of the things which the islanders were
always talking about: names, property, and ritual. A camera was one of a number of
pieces of equipment, including a portable typewriter and a small battery operated
reel-to-reel tape recorder, which were then considered necessary, if not essential,
1
The research reported here was supported by a grant from a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.
Research on Anafi and among Anafiot migrants in Athens has been supported over the years by the
following bodies: SSRC grant HR2445 (1973) and ESRC grant GOO232341 (1987), British School at
Athens (Hector and Elizabeth Catling Bursary for research in 2002), ESRC grant RES 00-22-1641 (2006).
2
For full details, see Kenna 2001a.
277
Figure 13.1 Margaret Kenna, Another camera at the festival? 8 September 1966
Source: The author
as aids in the collection and recording of information. Only one or two people on
the island at that time had cameras, and they did not appear to take photographs
of island events or landscapes. Migrants from the island who had settled in
Athens sometimes brought cameras with them when they visited the island,
usually concentrating on capturing family and friends rather than landscapes and
activities. However, a photograph taken on 8 September 1966 at the island’s main
festival (Fig. 13.1) shows an onlooker in the background in what seems to be a
characteristic ‘taking-a-photograph’ posture. It seems that there was more camera
use on the island and in the village, particularly during the summer when migrants
were visiting, than I had previously thought.
At the start of my fieldwork, taking photographs was primarily to illustrate a
thesis which was as yet unwritten. Photographs were to be a form of authentication
of its content.3 A consideration of their significance for local people developed
later, as did their importance as future historical records. I gave little thought to
issues of editorial control over these images, to questions of confidentiality, and
issues of intellectual property rights (see Caplan 2010). What were, in 1966,
photographs of the ‘here and now’ of life on the island, have become ‘there and
then’ in the present, for viewers who may be full of nostalgia for people, landscapes
and activities which no longer exist (see Edwards 2001). These photographs may
3
See Banks 2000: 145; for a discussion of the role of photography in anthropology, see Collier
1957, 1987; Collier and Collier 1986; Davies 1999: Ch. 6; Banks 2000; Edwards 2009; Banks and
Vokes 2010; Pinney 2011.
From ‘here and now ’ to ‘then and there’ 279
also contain images which the people concerned, or their descendants, do not wish
to be seen, and they have also become contested resources for some islanders and
migrants, particularly with respect to enterprises concerning personal prestige and,
in some cases, financial gain (for example, access to the images in order to sell them
as postcards).
Explanations to the islanders, in halting beginners’ Greek, of the purpose of
conducting research on the island were couched in terms of collecting information
about manners and customs (ta ithi kai ethima) on the island, while stressing that
the project was not exactly folkloristic and not exactly historical, but an attempt
to find out about the way of life on the island at that particular point in time.
Ironically, 40 years later, I found that the island had been visited by a folklorist
(Stefanos Imellos) in the previous summer (August 1965) to that in which my
research began, on one of the Hellenic Folklore Centre’s summer ‘missions’
(apostoles). He had recorded tales of local landmarks and local folksongs (Imellos
1965). The Folklore Centre in Athens, part of the Athenian Academy, plans to
publish the Anafi section of the notebook by Imellos (now an ‘immortal’ of the
Academy), illustrated with photos from 1966–67, and containing essays by both of
us about our respective research on the island.
The analogy of a photograph was an easy one to use to the Anafiots to explain
what was being attempted: after all, the great names in anthropological research
had drawn a distinction between synchronic studies and diachronic studies, using
the analogy with still photographs for synchronic studies and with cinema film for
diachronic studies (Nadel 1951: 100; Firth 1964: 54; cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 4).
I told the Anafiots that I wanted to capture a picture of island life as it was then
in 1966, but to do so in words, showing how all the aspects of their lives fitted
together. As my fieldwork continued, however, these intentions altered. The
island had been experiencing depopulation for decades, with men leaving as both
seasonal and permanent labour migrants. Some women left too, but usually wives
going to join their husbands; only a very few unmarried women were working in
Athens at that time. The village consisted mainly of old people, small children,
and women without their menfolk. The seasonal migrants found work in Athens
over the summer (usually as builders’ labourers, through their ties with migrant
relatives and through other contacts), during the slack period of the agricultural
cycle after harvest, and many of them decided to stay and work in the city. So it
was impossible to get this ‘snapshot’ of life on the island without considering the
migrants, and without considering that all the aspects of islanders’ lives which
seemed to fit together were undergoing radical change.
What I could not foresee then was the role that photographs were to play
in facilitating relationships with the people of the island. At first I was asked to
take photographs at christenings, and after the Sunday liturgy, when members
of the congregation were in their better or best clothes. This involved a long wait
for everyone because film could only be developed on Santorini, the nearest large
island, or in Athens, which I visited roughly every three months. Routinely, two
or more sets of prints had to be ordered for any film as copies were needed to give
away as well as for personal research use: rather worrying on a student budget.
On my return from these trips, photographs were taken to the houses of those
who had asked for them, and this provided the opportunity to sit and talk, and,
in time, to turn the conversation to the topics which were beginning to emerge
as the themes of the thesis. These were: the pattern of naming children after
their grandparents and other relatives and their consequent rights to particular
pieces of property, and the obligations of the living to perform a cycle of rituals
for the souls of the dead (usually their parents) – that is, to organise, and pay
for, the rituals following a funeral and lasting over the course of subsequent
years (mnimosyna, memorial services). The photographs of family groups were
particularly useful in this respect in allowing questions about why a child had
been given a particular name, or when the cycle of ceremonies for a deceased
relative was likely to be completed.
When people asked for photographs to be taken, particularly of their
children, the request was frequently justified by the comment that they wanted
something to send to the child’s godparent, often a migrant islander in Athens.
The photographs which they themselves had on display were often on a table
below the wall on which their wedding garlands were hung and under the shelf
on which the household Christian icons were placed. The oldest photographs
were stiffly posed portraits (because of the necessity of long exposures at the time
they were taken), usually of their parents or grandparents, and more recent prints
were most frequently of christenings and weddings, usually of migrant relatives,
taken in Athens: evidence of the use of photographs to maintain contact between
migrants and their island relatives. There were very few informal pictures, but
if there were, these often showed a young man with a group of friends, taken
during military service. Seeing the type of photo which was displayed in people’s
houses helped me to understand the formal poses which they usually adopted
when being photographed at their own request.
There were also awkward explanations of why some prints were black and
white and others in colour – the latter being much more highly regarded. On a
small student budget using black and white film as standard was an economy, and
this is what was usually in my camera, to be used for taking pictures of people at
work on everyday tasks in their homes and workshops, and out in the fields and
olive groves. An implicit assumption here associates the greater expense of buying
and developing colour film with using it for events of particular importance.
I realise now that I reserved it for special occasions such as a saint’s day festival,
and these were often the events at which people asked to be photographed when
in their best clothes. Ironically, it was more frequently those villagers with whom
strong friendships were developed who were visited while they were working,
and hence they were captured in black and white images. Those less well known,
photographed at festivals, were the ones who received colour prints. However, on
some occasions, the remains of a colour film were in the camera after a festival and
thus was used when taking everyday shots, and on one occasion (the September
festival in 1966) colour film had run out and one of the most important events
of the Anafiot religious calendar had to be taken in black and white (as shown in
Fig. 13.1). This is a topic to which I shall return later.
The photographs taken soon after arrival are mostly of places rather than of
people: the island’s only village taken from the path up from the harbour, hedged
by spiky agave (athanatos) and prickly pear plants; the characteristic barrel-vaulted
houses with their courtyard ovens; row-boats and small sailing vessels tied to the
small jetty at the harbour below the village on the island’s south coast. Many other
visitors to the island left visual records which were of places rather than of people.
Most of these earlier visitors, predominantly archaeologists, were interested in the
antiquities on Anafi: in the mid-nineteenth century there was Ludwig Ross (Ross
1840, 1861, 1912), and Laurits Winstrup (Bendtsen 1993: 16–17), and in the late
nineteenth century Hiller von Gaertringen (1899). Their photographs or drawings
are of objects: ruins, statues, inscriptions – although Hiller’s photographs sometimes
include his travelling companions to indicate scale, and Winstrup includes a sketch
of the only plane tree on the island on a page of sketches of Hellenistic grave-
markers.4 Even Imellos took only four black-and-white photographs (of the village
and of the Monastery) in which no people at all appear.
One of the first things I attempted after arriving was to draw a plan of the
village, and to do this I climbed up the rock which had once been the site of a
Venetian castle (the kastro), around which the village houses were circled from the
west, facing Santorini, to the south, overlooking the harbour, and then to the east,
with a view of Mount Kalamos at the eastern end of the south coast. The cold and
windy north-facing side of the castle rock was used at that time only for stables
and storehouses. From various vantage points above the village, a panoramic series
of overlapping photographs was taken, and this was done on each subsequent visit
so that changes could be identified. Each neighbourhood was explored to record
buildings and pathways, and to find out which houses were lived in, which belonged
to migrants in Athens, and which had other uses as cafes, groceries and storehouses.
In doing this, I acquired a sense of the village as a set of neighbourhoods where
particular people lived and with shortcuts from one area to another. The villagers,
too, began to get used to me, and after a while I was no longer followed everywhere
by curious children, and they would carry on playing while I looked over walls to
see women working in their courtyards washing clothes or baking bread.
My perception of the village, and my movements around it, were very different
from those of most villagers. When I mentioned to one woman where I had just
been walking, she commented that she had played in that neighbourhood as a
child, but because she had no relatives now in that part of the village, she had no
reason to go there, and hadn’t been there for decades. The same was true for parts of
the island. Most men knew the areas where their own family land was situated, or
where they went to work as agricultural labourers, usually for a particular employer.
So, too, for women, although as some of them were likely to be employed as olive-
4
Bendtsen 1993: 361, drawing LAW 187. The tree is still standing in the location named after it,
Platanos.
pickers (being paid in an agreed amount of oil, rather than in cash), the areas of
the island with which they were familiar might be different from those that even
the men of their own family knew. Some men had knowledge of parts of the
island other than their own property because they went out shooting for birds
and rabbits. I now realise that photographs of island landscapes were of interest
to them precisely because they showed other areas of the island to people who
only knew them by name, and they were able to evaluate hearsay by examining the
photographs very carefully, commenting on the upkeep of hill-terrace walls, olive

trees, and the location of various landmarks.5
In time, people began to tell me of events which they thought I might like to
record with camera or on audio-tape. Even if there was an element of self-interest
in this because they were likely to get a photograph of themselves taken at the event,
some idea of what I was trying to do had become clear to them. The most dramatic
example of this was two months after my arrival when a young girl encouraged me,
without telling me why, to take my camera with me to what I assumed would be an
ordinary Sunday morning service. Immediately after the service, the congregation
walked to the cemetery on the eastern edge of the village, a grave was broken open,
a coffin lifted out, and an exhumation (ektafi) took place. The bones were sprinkled
with wine, wrapped in white linen, together with a sprig of basil, and, so I was told
later, would be taken out to a chapel on family land and placed in an ossuary there.
Immediately afterwards, the congregation returned from the cemetery to the village
church, and there a mnimosyno took place – a memorial ceremony in which members
of the congregation were encouraged to take handfuls of boiled wheat mixed with
pomegranate seeds (kollyva) which was handed out by men positioned on the pillars
of the church gateway. Cakes and biscuits were distributed, and adults were offered a
glass of banana liqueur poured from a flask. Despite surprise and shock, I stood at a
distance to photograph the scene, and later asked people what had been happening.
Over the course of the summer, particularly when members of the Anafiot
migrant community in Athens began to arrive for their summer holidays, further
mnimosyna took place, some organised by the migrants, who brought biscuits and
cakes from the city with them, which made the distribution more varied. The
significance of these rituals was not clear to me, but they were obviously of great
importance and interest to the Anafiots. No one had any objection to the taking
of photographs of the distribution outside the church, and on one occasion, with
the priest’s permission, one was taken inside the church to aid later careful scrutiny
of the objects laid out. This was preferable to sketching the layout of the table in a
notebook and writing descriptive notes in a crowded church.
5
This lack of knowledge of places on their own small island was even more vividly illustrated
in 2002. A Greek TV presenter, Maya Tsokli, appeared in a documentary about Anafi. She and a
cameraman walked to remote areas on the island and also to beaches on the south coast. One of them,
Kleisidi, the beach nearest to the harbour, was described in glowing terms and filmed in best travelogue
style. The day after the documentary was shown, locals came down to Kleisidi who had never been there
before, to see it for themselves.
Figure 13.2 Margaret Kenna, Threshing with mules, summer 1967

Source: The author
After I had witnessed several of these memorial services over the course of
the summer, some idea of the standard sequence of events began to emerge. As
an anthropologist, with a focus on the taken-for-granted assumptions of Anafiot
everyday life, I was not so much interested in what the official explanation of
these rituals might be, but more in what the islanders themselves thought was
happening, and why they felt that it was so important to carry them out – and
to do so in such a way that as many people as possible participated, by taking
the kollyva and the other items offered, and by saying the phrase, ‘May God
forgive him’. The islanders said that every time the phrase was uttered, a sin
dropped off the soul of the dead person, so that by the time the whole cycle
of ceremonies had taken place over the course of a number of years until the
exhumation, the clean bones would show that the soul too had been cleansed
of sin.
Over the course of 16 months on the island, I recorded nearly all the stages
and processes of the agricultural year. Islanders said that the ideal was for
each family household to own enough fields to provide grain for bread for
a whole year, and enough olive trees to yield a sufficient supply of oil. Those
who did not, obtained flour and oil in other ways, for example by working
as harvesters or olive-pickers in return for payment in kind. Or they ran a
flour-mill or an olive press and took 10 per cent of what they processed as
payment.
One of the photographs of farming activities warrants careful scrutiny

(Fig. 13.2). This photograph is from a reel of black and white film taken during
harvesting time in June 1967, after more than a year’s fieldwork. Although, as
I have explained, black-and-white film was used for reasons of economy, the
image now gives to the viewer a sense of the authenticity of the subject matter, a
sense associated with non-colour film as a vehicle for reportage and verismo. The
location of the scene in the photograph is an area of farming land, on the south
coast of the island, about an hour’s walk from the island’s only village, where the
sloping ground is terraced into steps. It is mid-afternoon, as indicated by the
shadows cast by the sun as it moves west to set behind the island of Santorini.
The only person in the picture is a man wearing a stiff-brimmed sunhat, looking
up at the camera. It is clear that he knows he is being photographed and is
posing cooperatively, perhaps also anticipating that he is likely to be given a copy
of the resulting image as a memento. His shirt sleeves are rolled up in the heat,
and he holds a stick in his right hand.
This man is known by name to most of those who look at the photograph.
He was in his late 50s when it was taken, father at that time of six sons and one
daughter, born between 1937 and 1954. He owned land in the area of the island
where the photograph was taken and employed there the harvesters of the grain
he is threshing. He was also known for his involvement in the cult of the island’s
patron saint, Panagia Kalamiotissa (Our Lady the Virgin of the Reed), whose icon
he helped carry in procession on the festival of the Birth of the Virgin, 8 September.
A photograph taken in September 1966 records this. He was photographed again
in 1973 carrying the icon with one of his sons at this festival. His family was also
well known in the village as his sister was the village midwife. All these associations
surround his image and viewers’ different responses to it.
The position from which the photo was taken – with the photographer standing
on the hill-terrace above, looking down on the one below – was chosen so as to
show all the elements of the activity – the man, the animals, the circular threshing
floor: visual evidence of the processes involved. The intention was to record the
scene for possible use as an illustration for the not-yet-written thesis. At the time
of taking, the image was assumed to have in the future a very restricted range of
viewers – the photographer, the man at work (and his family), my thesis supervisor,
and (if the photo was used in the thesis), the thesis examiner. If the thesis was
successful, there might in the future be readers of the thesis (in a university library)
who would also look at the photograph. It was thus taken for the photographer’s
own personal, academic purposes and not for a large circle of viewers.
A description of the scene requires some explication of the objects and processes
involved. The smaller animals – dark-coated donkeys – are closer to the centre of
the circular threshing floor, while the larger, light-coated mules with a longer
stride are on the outer edge. The animals’ heads are linked together with a rope.
Their hooves trample the grain, separating the heads from the stalks, after which
the heads are winnowed on a day with a breeze, so that the heavier seed-heads fall
straight down, and the lighter chaff (outer casing) is blown into a separate heap.
These lightly mounded heaps can be seen to the left of the photograph, while the
stooks of grain still to be spread under the animals’ feet are on the right, leaning against
the inner edge of the threshing floor. Just outside the stones which circle the area of
the threshing floor is a neat pile of animal droppings (near left of photo). When an
animal lifts its tail, the thresher, or a child assistant, rushes to catch the droppings in a
net at the end of a pole, to prevent the dung being trodden into the grain.
Also visible near the threshing floor are storage pits, one front left, the other
behind the standing man. They are lined and ringed with stones, and with thorn
branches ready to be spread over the opening to keep out birds, rodents and other
creatures. Threshed grain will be placed in these pits and later transported to the
village in sacks tied onto donkeys and mules. Handfuls are poured into sieves, and
the grain is spread out so that bits of straw and small pebbles can be removed, a task
usually undertaken by women, sitting chatting with the sieves on their knees. Some
of the grain is fed directly to household chickens, and most of the cleaned grain is
then taken in sacks to one of the two diesel-engine driven flour mills in the village
(the last use of windmills was in the late 1940s). In the past, grain was also stored
in the space under a low platform (essentially a bed-base) inside the cottage, on top
of which people could sleep, particularly at harvest-times when they wanted to use
every daylight hour to bring in their crops. To the left can also be seen an olive tree
and prickly pear bushes, while on the right is a two-roomed cottage (known on the
island as a katoikia rather than the usual Greek term kalyvi). Each rectangular room
has a flat roof with a raised edge or rim; the roofs were used for spreading out and
drying harvested and collected produce. Next to the door of the cottage is a small
rectangular stone trough, possibly used for water for animals, and there is also a
much smaller stone with a circular depression in it, rather like a mortar.
While it is clear that the photograph records a moment during the threshing
of the grain harvest carried out by the man driving a team of mules and donkeys
around a circular threshing floor, what today’s islander or migrant viewer sees is
an image of an activity carried out nearly 50 years ago which has ceased to take
place: an activity which was part of a life-style (subsistence agriculture) which
exists no longer. The photograph, taken at a particular moment in time, captures
the ‘here-now’ of that moment, a moment which is now decades in the past, giving
the photograph in the present the reality of ‘having-been-there’. The apparent
naturalness and objectivity of the photograph – recording something which was
actually happening – is now invested with historical significance.
Since the 1960s, there has been a decline in agricultural production to the point
where only about one-tenth of the area of land once under grain cultivation is still
being used. Wheat is no longer grown at all (flour is imported and bread made at a
bakery in the village), and barley is grown only for hay and to make into a kind of
rusk used as animal feed for chickens and dogs. Even in the 1960s, many hill-terraces
were no longer being cultivated and were left fallow or becoming overgrown, but
there were mixed flocks of sheep and goats which grazed them, with a rent, reckoned
as a certain weight in cheese, being paid to the land-owner by the shepherd. Now the
retaining stone walls of hill terraces are scarcely visible, and the outlines of hill-slopes
are no longer stepped but have almost reverted to unbroken smoothly mounded
shapes. There are both paved and unpaved roads to almost all parts of the island, with
most villagers owning a scooter or agricultural ‘quad bike’, a flat-bed truck, or a car.
Lorries, buses and mini-vans use the paved road between harbour and village and
along the island’s south coast, so there is little need for horses, mules or donkeys. The
thousands of sheep and goats of the 1960s have shrunk to a few hundred goats kept
in one flock, and there are only a few score donkeys on the island.
Looking at this photograph today, many islanders and migrants use the
adjectives aplo (simple) and agno (pure) to describe the way of life that threshing,
as part of subsistence agriculture, was part of. For them, the scene evokes nostalgia
for a time and for activities which have ceased to exist on the island, for pure air,
foodstuffs uncontaminated by chemicals and a healthy lifestyle. A statement often
heard is ‘we were all one then’, stressing that the island community was united in
a way of life close to nature, based on human physical effort and on animal and
natural power, and also united as a community. The whole world of meanings in
this phrase is one which selects some features of that way of life, and omits others.
The comparison is with urban life then, and with island life now, greatly dependent
on tourism and on government and European Community projects and grants.
The field notes I wrote in the 60s provide evidence that factionalism both between
islanders and migrants and within these groups pre-dated the coming of electricity,
harbour improvements, and the construction of roads, and show that the island
community was never ‘all one’. In addition, the attribution of simplicity and purity
to the islanders’ way of life omits the often debilitating health problems suffered
(both physical and psychological), and the physical demands of unmechanised
subsistence agriculture on men, and also on women.
One of the wider connotations of the photograph concerns the resonances in
Greek poetry and literature of the word aloni (threshing floor), resonances of struggle
and heroism. This phrase is well known in English as the title of Philip Sherrard’s
book about five modern Greek poets (Sherrard 1956). The ‘marble’ of a threshing
floor might well have been from ancient Greek buildings (death, thanatos is even
today referred to as ‘Charon’, the ancient Greek ferryman of the dead) thus linking
the ancient pagan and the Christian Greek worlds.6
6
In addition, the phrase also occurs in a poem (‘Antonis’) by Iakovos Kambanellis, one of a
sequence about the WWII forced labour camp in a quarry at Mauthausen in Austria, which was set
to music by Mikis Theodorakis. In the poem there is an appeal to Antonis for help by one of the
Jewish forced labourers trying to carry a heavy boulder (intended for paving the streets of Vienna)
from the quarry up a flight of over 180 steep uneven steps. Helping another inmate would be severely
punished by the guards: ‘help is an insult, compassion a curse’. Antonis states his name (μένα με λεν
Αντώνη – ‘they call me Antonis’) and ends the poem with the words: κι αν είσαι άντρας έλα δω, στο
μαρμαρένιο αλώνι – ‘if you are a man, come here on this marble threshing floor’, a defiant challenge
and statement that here, heroes are wrestling with death. Although islanders might not recognise the
poem, Theodorakis’s music is well known all over Greece, and the song would be familiar to them,
with all its connotations of heroic masculinity and the struggle for survival.
Figure 13.3 Margaret Kenna, ‘The last curtained bed on the island’, 1967
Source: The author
As many writers about rural Greece have noted (e.g. Friedl 1962: 75), the most
common reply of farming folk to the question ‘how are you; what are you doing?’
is palevoume, ‘we are wrestling/struggling’. The sense here is that agricultural life is
always a contest in which human intelligence and strength are pitted against the
forces of nature, and against fate/luck. This photograph of a man standing on a
threshing floor carries with it these many layers of meaning.
It is clear from some of these photographs that the people in them are busy
with the work in which they are engaged but are also aware of the camera, looking
towards it, smiling, or even ‘posing’ by freezing their actions, and by ‘performing’
the task in such a way that it is more easily recorded. This consciousness of the
lens is even more evident in the stance of a woman who invited me to see ‘the last
curtained bed in the village’ (Fig. 13.3), aware that this moment would be captured
on film. Sometimes the intricacy or immediacy of the task makes it difficult or
impossible for the subjects to pose, and on other occasions, although they know
the camera is there, most people’s bodily postures and facial expressions seem to
indicate that they are not concerned whether the shutter is being pressed. In some
photos, therefore, people appear to be behaving ‘naturally’ (that is as if unaware
of or indifferent to, the camera) while others acknowledge its, or rather my,
presence. All these photographs show that most of the villagers had, within a few
months, become familiar with the camera and were aware of the possibility that
photographs might be taken on any occasion. They were also aware that they would
receive copies of any photographs in which they appeared or figured prominently.
Figure 13.4 Margaret Kenna, A café proprietor: behind him is a photo of his
wife and her sister, baking bread, 1966
Source: The author
This awareness led to requests for me to take photographs of events for absent
relatives; this had occurred almost from the moment of my arrival with respect to
christenings, but I was surprised to be asked to take photographs at the funeral
of an old woman, ‘so that her relatives will know that everything was done
properly’.
In at least one photo (Fig. 13.4), there is evidence of the incorporation of my
gifts of photographs into the everyday life of the villagers. A café-proprietor sits
with newspapers on the desk in front of him, and in the glass-fronted cabinet
above his head can be seen a small print of a photo I had taken several months
before of his wife and her sister baking. In another instance, I saw through the
doorway of a family vault a photo that I had taken of a handicapped albino boy,
propped up on a box which presumably contained his bones.
As I realised later, when I was trying to organise my material into thesis chapters,
it might be fairly straightforward to photograph an object or an activity, but it was
much more difficult to use an image to convey a concept. The photographs of
the distribution of kollyva after memorial services, illustrating (as I hoped) the
extent of ritual obligations to the souls of the dead, required explanatory titles and
a great deal of textual description and interpretation. A picture may be worth a
thousand words, but I certainly needed several thousand words to explain some of
the illustrations in my thesis.
Figure 13.5 Margaret Kenna, Three ‘wolves’ (on left) and two ‘cats’ (on right) in
a photo taken in January 1967
Source: The author
In 2001 a book was published about the fieldwork conducted in 1966–67,

based on letters which I had written to my parents, on my field notes, on reports
which I wrote to my supervisor and on a personal diary (Kenna 2001a). In the
following year, I took copies to give to the islanders and to the migrants. Not
surprisingly, as the text was in English, it was the photographs which most people
turned to, anxious to find their younger selves and their deceased relatives. It was
this experience which helped me to realise the power and significance of these
images to the Anafiots.
The idea of donating the photos to the Benaki Photo-Archive had been
suggested back when I first visited the tiny office at the back of the Museum where
the archive had its first location. Fani Konstantinou, the Director of the archive,
who at our first meeting told me that some of her forebears came from Anafi,
asked me to promise that I would give the images to the archive, and I have now
begun to fulfil that undertaking. In preparation for handing over these prints and
negatives, which date from 1966–67 to the present day, I have worked out a way
of annotating the images, in order to write commentaries on each frame; my own
ideas about content and context. When I took the images on a laptop to Greece
in 2010 to show to Anafiot islanders and migrants, I hoped to get help to identify
some individuals and places in these photographs, in cases where I had failed to
note these details at the time. But I also got much more than help with filling out
the gaps in annotations, and I realised how many different kinds of commentary
on the photos could be made. For example, looking recently at a photo taken after
church in early January 1967 (Fig. 13.5), one informant commented wryly: ‘Three
“wolves” and two “cats”’ – referring to the nicknames (paratsouklia) of the families
of the individuals in the photo.
I was told that the ‘cats’ were so nicknamed after one of the men in the family
who used to dip his tongue into his hot coffee and then lick around his mouth with
his tongue in a circular motion. The ‘wolves’ belonged to the family of a man who
used to threaten his donkey ‘If you don’t get going, a wolf will eat you’. Sometimes
particular details in the photographs are commented on, details I hadn’t even
noticed or considered, and stories about past lives are told. And showing these
photos often encouraged people to bring out their own old photos – in one case,
a photo of pupils and their teacher at the only school on Anafi in 1951. My
informant was able to identify all but about 10 of the 85 or so individuals in the
photo – and those she couldn’t name were boys unrelated to her.
Learning from experience, in particular and in general
The experience of interviewing in the 1990s former exiles to whom I showed the
photographs taken while they were political detainees on Anafi (Kenna 2001b),
helped me in this recent project not only to look at photographs with fresh eyes,
but also to ask questions of islanders and migrants about the photos in previously
unconsidered ways. These techniques of ‘photo-elicitation’ (cf. Kalantzis, this
volume) include asking questions such as: ‘What comes into your mind when
you look at this photo?’ a non-directive approach which can often bring up old
memories, including those of smells, textures and tastes. As a result of having heard
these sensory memories, I asked more directive questions of islanders and migrants
about their own remembrances of flavours, physical sensations, sounds and odours,
finding that these were often related in complex ways (as Sutton has also described,
2001). The experience of discussing the photographs with islanders and migrants
was thus cumulative in terms of the research because when I found that aspects of
the photos were commented on that I had not previously anticipated, I brought
suggestions about these considerations into my questioning. I also tried much
more consciously to keep silent, inspired by Loizos’s description of tape-recording
Cypriot refugees: ‘I would wait without speaking, nodding and looking attentive,
and these cues often helped them to continue …’ (1981: 190). And, of course, there
were direct questions such as ‘Can you identify any people in this picture?’
As the research continued, I experienced for myself the validity of scholarly
observations made about the subtle documentary power of black and white
images which seemed both for me and other recent viewers to be so authoritative;
they were clearly of the past and yet bringing that past into the present. Many
of the black and white images taken in the 1960s were poorly printed either
on photographic paper that went brown very quickly or with little attention to
light-dark contrasts. Comparisons between prints and negatives (which modern
negative scanning makes possible) show a greater clarity of detail in negatives,
and it was mostly images from these scans of negatives (appearing as if they
were positive) which I showed to informants. The colour films, mostly developed
in Athens, had faded and seemed to show a more transient and less securely
reliable past. Even the negatives, when scanned, produced poor quality leached
images which appeared to me somehow less valid and more dated than the black
and white ones. It felt as if the alteration of colour hues paralleled the changes
brought about by time to the places and people in the images, and to personal
knowledge and feelings. The association of black and white with the everyday, and
of colour with special occasions, now created a sense of the images of everyday
life as linked to more firmly grounded and basic events and the colour images as
recording more transient and ephemeral occasions. These perceptions, elicited by
reflexive questioning, will be fed back into the next stages of the research, and
one way of exploring these feelings about the respective association of black and
white and colour would be to use modern photo manipulating techniques to
reproduce the colour images in black and white.
Conclusion
Anafi has in the last few years changed its administrative status from a koinotis
(community) to a dimos (an administrative unit at a higher level and therefore
with more funds at its disposal), and consequently local elections have taken
place for the position of dimarhos (mayor) and members of the council. One of
the promises made by the candidates was to create a Folklore Museum on the
island. Old agricultural implements and domestic items would be collected for
display, my photos of ‘the old days’ were wanted for illustration, and each of the
candidates wanted exclusive access to them. So the photos became objects of
political contestation in the here-and-now as well as being historical resources
of the there-and-then. It might be anticipated that in such a museum the
island’s past could be evaluated either in a mostly negative fashion, through the
tone of possible captions (implying ‘look how tough life was then; haven’t we
progressed?’) or positively (‘there was a direct relationship then with nature and a
real sense of community; isn’t that missing now?’). Although this was completely
unanticipated, the decision to donate photographs to the archive provided
some kind of temporary solution to problems of making invidious judgements
between competing claims, but in the future, any islander or migrant who asks
for non-commercial use of the images will be able to label them in whatever way
they wish.
The role of photography in ethnographic fieldwork is now recognised as
so much more complex than when it was used initially, and to some extent
uncritically, as a means of recording visual information for the researcher and for
a restricted circle of viewers, assumed to be the readers of scholarly monographs
and articles. When photographs were first used, there was no alternative to
black and white; later, publications might have a colour frontispiece and black
and white images in the main text. Developments in printing, possibilities of

web publication, the withdrawal from public sale of black and white negative
film and the difficulties of getting it printed (and the scarcity of cameras which
use film), the possibility of transposing colour images into black and white, all
pose problems for the researcher aware of the associations of different kinds of
images, whether used as illustration, or as an aspect of fieldwork techniques of
data gathering. These problems and complexities also include issues of informed
consent and agreement by those photographed, as well as the identification of

copyright holders. These might be perceived as legalistic but have important
ethical and moral dimensions, as Caplan (2010) has argued with respect
to the archiving of fieldwork materials of various kinds. What might be the
consequences of giving back images to the communities where they were taken?
Who makes the decisions when images are contested artefacts? In the specific
instance presented in this paper, it seems that the researcher can never wholly
anticipate what might happen.
References
Banks, M. (2001), Visual Methods in Social Research, London: Sage.

Banks, M. and R. Nokes (2010), ‘Introduction: Anthropology, Photography and
the Archive’, History and Anthropology 21(4): 337–49.
Barthes, R. (1977), ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, in R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text,
London: Fontana, 32–51.
Bendtsen, M. (1993), Sketches and Measurings: Danish Architects in Greece 1818–1862,
Copenhagen: Skrifter udgivet af Kunstakademiets Bibliotek.
Caplan, P. (2010), ‘Something for Posterity or a Hostage to Fortune? Archiving
Anthropological Field Material’, Anthropology Today 26(4): 13–17.
Collier, J. Jnr (1957), ‘Photography in Anthropology: A Report on Two
Experiments’, American Anthropologist 59: 843–59.
Collier, J. Jnr (1987), ‘Visual Anthropology’s Contribution to the Field of
Anthropology’, Visual Anthropology 1(1): 37–46.
Collier, J. Jnr and M. Collier (1986), Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research
Method, Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Davies, C.A. (1999), Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and
Others, London: Routledge.
Oxford: Berg.
Edwards, E. (2009), ‘Photography and the Material Performance of the Past’,
History and Theory 48(4): 130–50.
Hiller von Gaertringen, F. (1899), Thera, Untersuchungen, Vermessungen und Ausgraben
in den Jahren 1895–1902: Erster Band – Die Insel Thera in Altertum und Gegenwart,
Berlin: Georg Reimer.
Imellos, S. (1965), Unpublished notebook, archives of KEEL (Centre for Greek

Folklore Research, ref 2957).
Kenna, M.E. (2001a), Greek Island Life: Fieldwork on Anafi, Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic Publishers (now Routledge Harwood).
Kenna, M.E. (2001b), The Social Organisation of Exile: Greek Political Detainees
in the 1930s, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers (now Routledge
Harwood).
Loizos, P. (1981), The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nadel, S.F. (1951), The Foundations of Social Anthropology, London: Cohen & West.
Pinney, C. (2011), Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1952), Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London:
Cohen & West.
Ross, L. (1840), ‘Reisen auf den griechischen Inseln des agäischen Meeres’, in
E. Widemann and W. Hauft (eds), Reisen und Länderbeschreibungen, Stuttgart
and Tübingen, 75–86.
Ross, L. (1861), ‘Über Anaphe und anaphäische Inschriften’, in Archäologische
Aufsatze, Leipzig: Teubner, 486–527.
Ross, L. (1912), ‘Achter Brief: Anaphe; Thera’, in Inselreisen I (Klassiker der
Archäologie im Neudruck Herausgegeben), Halle: Max Niemeyer, 75–86.
Sherrard, P. (1956), The Marble Threshing Floor: Studies in Modern Greek Poetry,
London: Valentine Mitchell.
Sutton, D.E. (2001), Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory,
Oxford: Berg.

14
Pictures of Exile, Memories of Cohabitation:

Photography, Space and Social Interaction in
the Island of Ikaria
Elena Mamoulaki
This chapter examines the relationship between the making of collective

memory and photography through an ethnographic exploration of ways in
which photographs in a shop on the Greek island of Ikaria function not only as
documentary evidence of the civil war era. The photographs are also analysed as
pivotal objects in social interactions, especially in gift exchanges that shape people’s
historical consciousness and collective memory. In particular, the focus is on how
this photography shop acts as a locus for the making and keeping of memories of
internal exile: of political exiles and their families and of the islanders who hosted
them between 1946 and 1949, in the early years of political oppression during
Greece’s post-WWII civil war.
It is common experience that history arrives to us not only through the academic
discipline carried out by professionals, and shaped by their various theoretical and
political agendas, but also through the social, interpersonal relationships that
create specific meaning and value for the past in quotidian processes. As is stated
by Nora (1989), these milieux de mémoire, or else the real environments of memory
(such as the photography shop described here), provide important places for this
type of history-making. Seen in this way, photography is not just a practice that
has documentary or artistic value, but it also becomes a making and displaying
of ‘inalienable’ objects which trigger and are charged with feelings, ideas and
memories (see also Mauss 1990; Weiner 1992; Hermann 1997; Godelier 1999).
In this chapter, I focus on an ‘archive’ (see Papailias 2005: 1–41) of photographs
exhibited in a photography shop in the village of Rahes, on the north-west side
of the island of Ikaria, which is located in the North East Aegean (see Melas
2001; Papalas 2005; Yagourtas 2004). My methodological viewpoint is that these
photographs are not just objects with a mere market value. They are personalised
objects charged with affective value and are exchanged in terms of the inter-
295
subjective linkages they are associated with. Thus, I focus on this site of memory
from the perspective of the reality of the personal relationships that are respected
and that the same actors have showed me. I will argue that the Rahes photography
shop works as an informal museum for the memory of internal exile in Ikaria.
Memory here is understood as ‘our relationship with the past (that) is not
simply forged through factual knowledge or intellectual understanding of cause
and effect. It also involves ‘imagination and empathy’ (Morris-Suzuki 2005: 22),
as well as interpersonal relationships that allow information, objects, feelings and

ideas to be constantly exchanged and transmitted. The civil war period in Ikaria
was marked by the cohabitation of locals and exiles, and their relationships of
reciprocity in the context of mutual hospitality. The theoretical argument of this
chapter draws on the definition of ‘collective memory’ proposed by Maurice
Halbwachs (1952) and on Ricoeur’s focus on the complex phenomenology of
memory (2004). Memory is made by socially experienced and interpreted facts
with minor subjective differences; memory is lived experience that leaves traces
even without intention; memory goes together with oblivion. Located somewhere
between the personal and the collective, the private and the public, the ways in
which this ‘archive’ of photos has been and continues to be created and used,
presents different forms of inter-subjective collective memory. Fieldwork on Ikaria
provided the opportunity to observe a number of particular ways in which history
was negotiated – and constructed – through these photographs. The contention of
this paper is that this collection was, in great part, created and is being socialised
via the gift exchange of photographs in the context of the past hospitality and
its contemporary re-enactments. The shaping of the historical identities of locals,
former exiles and their families is marked by the social relationships mediated by
the exchange and sharing of the civi-war-era photographs.
Exile on Ikaria1
The Aegean island of Ikaria was used as an exile camp during the Greek Civil
war of 1946–49. During that period, more than 12,000 left-wing Greek citizens
were sentenced to internal deportation as punishment for having opposed the
authoritarian post-WWII Greek government, which was made up, among
others, of right-wing anti-communists and former Nazi collaborators, who
were supported by the British and American governments. Most of the political
detainees had participated or were suspected of having participated in the leftist
1
Most of the information comes from the extensive number of interviews with locals and
former exiles while in fieldwork in different times from 2006 to 2010. Other sources include Karimalis
1992; Mavroyorgis 1996; Kalo 1998; Dalianis 1999; Lountemis 2000; Theodorakis 2000; Papageorgakis
2003; Kamarinou 2005; Papalas 2005; Mamoulaki 2011; exiles’ hand-written newspapers and the local
newspaper Nea Ikaria, and unpublished exiles’ correspondence and diaries from Christos Malahias’
archive.
Pictures of exile, memories of cohabitation 297
movement of the national resistance against the Axis occupation of 1941–44,

which was mainly organised by the Communist Party of Greece and supported
by a large part of the population. Among those chosen by the government for
internal exile were often also some of the relatives or other possible ‘supporters’
of those who had taken part in this resistance movement or were suspected as
being ‘pro-Communists’. These prisoners, accompanied by dozens of gendarmes
and police officers, were sent to more than 35 Aegean islands, both inhabited and
uninhabited – including Makronissos, Anafi, Agios Efstratios, Trikeri, Chios,

Yaros and Ikaria.
Thus, while the experience of internal exile was common in Greece during the
civil war,2 the case of Ikaria was distinct in that it involved a particularly close and
intensive form of cohabitation of local and exile communities. Although political
exiles also lived in other inhabited islands, in Ikaria their large numbers and the fact
that many of them shared houses with the locals, created many special conditions.
In 1947, in a period of just a few months, more than 10,000 political (left-wing)
opponents of the right-wing Greek government were exiled to Ikaria – without
any provisions for housing, medical care or even much in the way of food supplies.
At that point in time, Ikaria had only about 10,000 inhabitants, who themselves
were just managing to scrape by. According to the authorities, the main reason for
this – and for all internal exile – was to protect the country from the ‘communist
threat’ (see Voglis 2002: 52–73).
While the conflict between Right and Left was ubiquitous throughout
Greece, not only in battlefields but also within families, in Ikaria the conflict
between the local royalists and the communists was dealt with in such a way
that the civil war was essentially avoided on the island.3 By the end of the Italian
and German occupation of WWII, the majority of the locals supported the
communist-led EAM (National Liberation Front) (Papalas 2005: 227), and a
significant proportion of the population was actively involved in the antifascist
organisations of EPON (United Greek Youth Organisation) and the local
Communist Party committees.
Despite their belonging to political parties from widely different locations
of the political spectrum (although the Left was – and still is – dominant
on the island), Ikarians for the most part responded to the influx of exiles
by overlooking their internal differences to ‘absorb’ the exiles through an
overwhelming wave of hospitality (Mamoulaki 2008). The negative reactions
against the exiles were very few and the great majority of the population tried
to protect and support them. ‘Ikarians embraced us’, is what most of the former
exiles said when asked about the locals’ reaction upon their arrival.4 Given that
2
See Mastroleon-Zerva 1986; Tsakiris 1996; Sarantopoulos 2000; Gritzonas 2001; Kenna 2001;
Birtles 2002; Voglis 2002; Georgiadis 2004; Oikonomopoulos 2004; Staveri 2006; Panourgia 2009.
3
See Close 1995; Mazower 2000; Margaritis 2002; Voglis 2002.
4
Numerous former exiles informants used the metaphor of the hug/embrace to describe the locals’
attitude upon their arrival on Ikaria as political detainees. My former exile informants were often moved
there were no prisons or concentration camps on the island, the locals opened
their houses to accommodate exiles – either in a family house not in use, or in
a room in the family home. They provided food and free land for cultivation
to exiles and their families, and tried to incorporate the newcomers into the
social life of the community in various ways, such as through creating kinship
bonds of godparenthood.
We couldn’t believe that apart from the many leftists on the island, many of our hosts were
ardent rightists and royalists and they were offering us their houses to stay and their few
products to eat. It is moving even after so many years to think about that (interview with
former exile 87-year-old Kostas, 29 September 2009).
The exiles, for their part, took initiatives to reciprocate the hospitality of the
locals in a number of different ways. Working groups were organised – e.g. of
engineers, lawyers, artisans, craftsmen, workmen, farmers, agronomists – and
free services were offered by exiles of all professions to locals as well as to each
other. Actors and theatre professionals presented plays; musicians taught and
performed. Doctors treated both locals and exiles; schoolteachers taught local
children as well. The exiles also took on technical projects such as building
cisterns, roads and water infrastructure for the villages. As these actions
demonstrate, the forced cohabitation among locals and exiles was dealt with
within a context of widely-shared ‘rules’ of hospitality and reciprocity, and the
adoption of respective roles of the host and the guest.
Beyond these acts of reciprocity, the exiles also drafted and imposed upon
themselves a list of 10 articles indicating proper behaviour within their group and
in relation to the locals (this was common practice among exile groups, see Kenna
2001: 45). One of the most discussed articles was one that forbade any contact
with local women. The exiles had to obey the Political Exiles Coexistence Groups,5
and suppress their sexual desires in order to respect the balance and ethos of the
local population. Offenders were severely punished by exclusion from the OSPE
(created to cover their basic daily needs) and this exclusion entailed complete
social isolation.
While the exiles had their articles as a guide for conduct, the locals treated
the exiles as their ‘unexpected’ and harassed guests that needed their assistance
in order to survive. This was not always simple, not only because of the extreme
poverty of the locals due to the devastated local post-war economy and the lack
of supplies, but also because of repression by the gendarmes and the prohibition
of contact between locals and exiles even when living in the same house. Thus,
many Ikarians were persecuted and punished – at times themselves being sent
into exile on other islands – for supporting the exiles.
when narrating those events and they expressed their gratitude for the Ikarians’ hospitality and solidarity.
The interviews took place in the informants’ houses in Athens, Crete and Ikaria from 2006 to 2010.
5
OSPE; for more on the function of these, see Gritzonas 2001 and Kenna 2001.
Figure 14.1 Kostantinos Petroyannis, Group of exiles in Koudoumas village,

c. 1947–1949
Source: Courtesy of Christos Malahias
Production and circulation of photographs
During this period, hundreds of photographs were taken of or by exiles. This was not
always easy. Only four local and two professional photographers from among the exiles
were allowed by the authorities to take photos in public spaces (information obtained
from interview with Christos Malahias, Rahes 12 November 2010). This is why most
photos from this period are set in the countryside or near the houses where the exiles
lived. Furthermore, the detainees faced various obstacles in obtaining cameras and
materials to take and develop photographs of their own accord. The cameras and photos
were carried in secret compartments of suitcases, sent hidden in packs of supplies, or
brought to Ikaria by visitors or by locals who travelled to Athens (Kassimatis 2002).
For the exiles, the production and circulation of photographs documenting their
experiences had a number of ‘aims’. One was to alleviate the concerns of worried
relatives and friends who were waiting for news. In most of these portraits, the exiles
appear neat and happy (Fig. 14.1), so that their relatives, upon receiving the pictures,
would be reassured of their safety and well-being. ‘It seems as if we are on excursion’,
said former exile Panayotis (interview, Karkinagri 10 August 2009) when he saw a
photograph of himself and his comrades. ‘Having our photos taken was a way to cheer
up. We posed and made jokes and we were “enjoying our suffering” in order to keep up
our morale’, said former exile Yorgos (interview, Athens 12 March 2009).
Judging from what many former exiles said about the reason they made
the effort to take pictures, it seems that it gave them a break from their daily
suffering, and put the experience of the deportation in another perspective – that
of a fragment of their life. ‘We had to pass our time in one way or another. After
all the hardship, we were alive, something not obvious in our conditions at that
time. There were strange and funny circumstances that made us laugh. After all we
couldn’t believe that we would live like that for years’ (interview with former exile
86-year-old Kostas, Rahes 18 October 2010). Framing their images and creating a
souvenir of their life in exile helped expunge the fear of their possible death due to
the dangers they were exposed to as detainees in exile – as if to confirm that they
would survive to contemplate these images later, in a better future.
Thus, it is possible to interpret these photographs as future mementos of exile.
That is, at the time they were taken, there was a supposed expectation that they would
survive. Many exiles believed that this was an important historical moment and that
these pictures would be used in future as testimonies of their struggle. At the same
time that the exiles were trying to survive and prepare for social revolution, many of
their comrades were fighting, being wounded or dying in battles on the mainland.
Thus, in some of these pictures, the exiles pose to show their collective works and
their other contributions to the movement (such as writing newspapers circulated
by posters of important figures of the communist party, celebrating EAM’s sixth
anniversary) and to local society (constructing roads and cisterns, staging plays).
Figure 14.2 Stelios Kassimatis, Group of exiles transfer stones in a human

chain for the community works in Evdilos village, c. 1947–1949
Figure 14.3 Unknown photographer, Group of exiles working for the road of
Arethousa village, c. 1947–1949
Source: Courtesy of Christos Malachias
Figure 14.4 Unknown photographer, Group of exiles reading and writing

newspapers in the village of Agios Polykarpos, c. 1947–1949
Many of the group photographs that portray everyday activities can be ‘read’ as
attempts to convey a spirit of comradeship and collective organisation (Figs. 14.2,
14.3 and 14.4). These photographs are testimonies that comrades were not ‘on
excursion’ and that their stay in exile was meaningful and fruitful to them in the
sense of contributing to ‘their movement’.
Given these constraints, according to many former exiles and locals, the exiles
created secret photographers’ working groups that consisted of both amateurs and
professionals. Some of the amateurs were thus taught the art of photography and
later worked as photographers. They set up their ‘dark rooms’ in storerooms and
barns. A small hole in the roof would be opened, and an improvised mechanism
installed below it to print photographs. Since materials were scarce, paper was
often cut into pieces and photographs were printed in small format.
These photographs were sent from Ikaria to the families and friends of exiles
on the mainland, either as prints or in the form of the negative to be developed
and – if possible – sent back to the island. Copies of photographs that depicted
exiles and locals together were often given to the locals as souvenirs. Many
islanders destroyed these pictures because they feared they would be found by the
gendarmes, who would accuse them of being pro-communist. Others hid them in
their houses or plots and later, when the political persecution had ended, put them
together with other photographs in their family albums (interview with 76-year-
old Maria, Kampos, 2 June 2009).
Some exiles were not able to send home the pictures they had taken in Ikaria,
so they took them with them to their next place of exile (Yaros, Makronissos, Ai
Stratis) where they were usually confiscated or damaged by the guards. Conditions
were much worse in these islands than had been experienced in Ikaria. There were
settled camps with tents in the model of concentration camps that where called
‘Camps subject to military discipline’. The exiles had very distant or no contact
with the local populations. Control by the guards was tighter and tortures tougher.
A much larger number of exiles died or were executed in this kind of camp.6
Many exiles on Ikaria had already heard about these conditions. Thus, before
leaving the island, they often entrusted their personal diaries, correspondence and
photographs etc. to the locals – in the context of affective relationships already
forged – for safe-keeping. Others hid them, usually inside or around the house
in which they were living: behind a stone in the house’s thick walls, under a
floorboard, or in the roof. Some put their photographs in an iron box and buried
it in the garden of the house, marking the place by noting a tree or leaving a mark
on a wall close by (interviews with former exiles). Decades later, some returned to
Ikaria and hunted for their hidden documents, trying to locate the secret place.
Some of these hidden troves were also discovered by locals, either following exiles’
instructions or accidentally, usually while undertaking renovation works in their
houses (interviews with local people).
6
Information based on numerous interviews with former exiles from 2006–10. Also see Kenna
2001 and Voglis 2002.
After the civil war ended, many exiles kept these emotion-laden depictions
of their exile in family collections for private use. Other photographs were
donated to public archives and museums (e.g. The Communist Party Archive
and the Archives of Contemporary Social History in Athens). As such, they
became part of public memory and, in this capacity, are unavoidably deprived of
much of the emotional value they had when used in familial or adopted ‘familial’
contexts.
Christos’s photography shop
In the village of Rahes, Christos Malahias’ photography shop contains an ‘archive’

of more than 300 ‘exile photographs’ that is neither a family collection nor an
institutional, public archive. Some of them are originals found in abandoned
houses while most of them are copies, enlargements of originals, loaned to him
by former exiles and locals. While the practice of maintaining a personal archive
is not exceptional in Greece today (Papailias 2005), this collection is notable in
that it is deeply rooted in the local community. Besides, many former exiles and
their family members pass by this shop while on their ‘pilgrimage’ to Ikaria.7 As
the following description and discussion hopes to demonstrate, this photography
shop plays a crucial role in the formation of collective memory about the civil
war period for both former exiles and locals. Christos Malahias, a 60-year-old
photographer from Ikaria, has his shop on the main square of the village. Before
this, for more than 15 years, Christos’s studio was located in his home.
According to Christos’s wife, Argiro:
If somebody needed to have a film developed or have an ID photograph taken, he would

come home; we would sit, have a coffee and talk for some time. These were people from
the region we knew and it was like a visit home, it was warmer and cosier in that way. The
only disadvantage was that there was no room for Christos’s photographs and the archive
to be exhibited so that people could see it. That’s why we decided to move to the shop in
the village square (interview, Rahes, 28 April 2010).
Argiro teaches philology and history in high school and has actively participated
in the making of the archive by teaching her students methods of oral history
so that they study periods of the local history through the testimonies of their
older relatives and neighbours. Like most Ikarians, Christos and Argiro dedicate
part of their working time to household agriculture and husbandry for the
family needs: they cultivate their own plot of land and have a few farm animals.
Christos’s work as a photographer primarily concerns landscape. Thus, not only
7
Many former exiles use the word ‘pilgrimage’ to refer to their visits to the places where they
were exiled. The ethical and emotional weight of the word describes the importance they attribute to
this journey and the moral and affective value this experience has for their lives.
has he visited all the island’s villages, but he also knows a great deal about the
topography of the island.
While wandering around the island over the last 30 years, encountering
different sites and people, he has also collected photographs, documents and other
materials related to different periods of local history, together with oral testimonies
of the island’s older residents. Christos developed a special interest in the period of
exile on Ikaria after accidentally finding an iron box with photographs of exiles in
his father’s homestead (his father had also been an exile, but on different islands).
This is how he described the finding of the box, in an interview on 2 May 2008:
In 1983 I was in our house courtyard. I saw our small goats jumping from an old yard-wall
and some of the stones were falling down onto the ground. While the supporting wall in
the terrace garden was partially falling apart I saw among the stones and the earth a piece of
cloth. I went closer to see what it was and I found a very old can of condensed milk inside
the cloth. Inside the can were photographs and letters from an exile. The correspondence
was with his mother and wife and the photographs depicted him and some other exiles. I
took them to the local organisation of the Communist Party so that they could send his
material back to him. But he was already dead. His material stayed in the Party’s archive. At
that time I was only collecting old documents related to local families. With time, I started
meeting former exiles who were visiting the island and while talking with them and other
older locals I realised the importance of the particularities of that period and of collecting
documents.
Over the years, he occasionally collected ‘exile photographs’ from several local –
family and personal – collections.
In 1997, a major public celebration was organised by the local citizens’
association to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the exiles’ arrival on the
island, and at this time Christos received many photographs from former exiles.
It was at that point that he started organising parts of his collection related to
that period. Now he keeps his archive both at home and at his shop, where he
occasionally exhibits different parts of it. After digitally restoring and printing
enlarged copies of the photographs, he carefully frames them and mounts them on
the main wall in his shop (Fig. 14.5), together with other old photographs of the
local community.
In his shop, hanging on the wall is a photograph of a group of exiles in 1947,
among other photographs of schoolchildren in 1936, a wedding in 1928, a village
feast in 1964 and a photograph of the uprising against the Ottomans in 1912.
Different in time, space and themes, these snapshots of the community’s life create
a non-linear narrative comprised of photographs of people who look straight into
the lens, who dance, parade and get married, or pose in front of the Communist
Party’s local offices in the midst of the war.
In these photographs the islanders’ ancestors appear, and the depicted scenes
are part of the island’s past, which becomes vivid through the stories narrated
in relation to the photographs by the people passing from Christos’s shop.
Figure 14.5 Elena Mamoulaki, Inner view of Christos Malahias’ photography

shop, September 2010
Source: The author
Thus exhibiting the photographs of the exiles together with photographs from
the island’s history more generally, Christos makes a statement concerning the
exiles’ place on the island, incorporating their history into the larger context of
the community’s memory. At the same time, he gives the opportunity to others
to comment on that history and participate in the creation of the community’s
memory. People loan Christos pictures that they consider important for the islands’
history and he occasionally exhibits them in the shop. It is a living process of a
history made by the interaction among people and between people and objects.
The photography shop in village and island context
The photography shop is part of the social life of the village. It is important that
it is located in the centre of the village square among coffee houses, the church,
the super-market and other stores. It follows the local shops’ opening hours, for
which Rahes is renowned: shops are open for only a few hours during the day, and
then again in the evening until as late as midnight or even later depending on the
season. Like most of the village’s shops, the photography shop serves a variety of
functions. Apart from developing, printing, and digitising photos, Christos sells
folk art objects, maps, postcards, books about Ikaria and local music CDs.
Above all, the photography shop is characterised by the extensive sociability
of village life: it is not uncommon to see people stopping by the shop to chat and
socialise even if they do not intend to buy anything. Many locals pass by the store
many times a day for reasons other than to have photos developed – to say hello
to Christos, to talk about the weather, to check the news on his computer which
unofficially serves as one of the few internet spots in the village, to chat about
village events, to leave their shopping bags to go somewhere else for a while, to rest
inside the shop when it is too hot outside, to wait for an appointment they have
arranged at the square or just to see who else might be there talking with Christos
and to join the conversation. Kostas, a middle-aged man with impaired hearing,
is a frequent visitor who is able to remember the family trees of all families of the
region along with accompanying stories. He explains to people their family stories
through Christos, who is able to understand him well.
Outside the store, Christos has placed a wooden bench and a small iron table
so that in the summer when people gather in the shop, they can sit there, order
something to drink from the cafe next door and chat while Christos continues
working inside. While engaged in these apparently peripheral activities, people
tend to look again and again at the photographs exhibited on the shop walls
and talk about them. Many of the locals bring Christos old family photographs
to enlarge and duplicate, so that they can give copies to their children or other
relatives. Others ask to look together with Christos through his archive to see if
there is any photo depicting an old relative of theirs.
It often happens that several people slowly gather around the old photographs
in this casual context and talk not only about the past but also about the present
and the future. Here is one example: one spring morning I was in the photography
shop when Christos finished printing a photograph of six violinists from 1954.
It was the only picture of so many musicians together, and while people were
passing by the shop, they stopped to comment on it. They tried to guess where
it was taken, and they explained that in the paniyiria (local celebrations of saints’
days; see Bareli 2008) it was very rare to see so many violinists play together. They
attempted to identify each violinist and explain the different style played by each
one and how people preferred one or the other. They narrated how the paniyiria
were held at that time, making comparisons with the present. They remembered
how people were dressed and the communal works for which they raised money on
various occasions. They talked about entertainment, celebrations, wine companies
and flirting, about how people met and fell in love, and they combined all this with
current gossip and ideas.
In short: the telling of memories, stories in their family contexts, genealogical
trees, and testimonies – and their linkages with the present – are occasioned by
the old photographs. The photography shop becomes a public, spontaneously

organised site for the individual and social recreation of memories – not only for
those who were involved, but for their descendants and other groups of Greeks and
foreigners. Situated somewhere between the private and the public, this collection
of photographs represents an intermediate social site for the making of collective
memory.
Crossroad of interests as well as memories vis-à-vis the exile period
In August 2010, a young couple entered Christos’s shop while I was there; they
wanted to buy a map of the island and some postcards. The woman stared silently
at the photographs of the exiles on the wall, while the man looked at the landscape
images and maps. She asked Christos if the pictures were of exiles. She then
started looking closely and carefully at the faces in the photos until she exclaimed:
‘That’s him!’ She explained that her grandfather had been an exile on Ikaria. He
was a reserved man who didn’t want to talk about his past. ‘I was asking him, but
he wouldn’t say much,’ she said, ‘until I told him that I intended to go to Ikaria on
holiday. He got excited and started talking to me about the island, the people, and
the village where he had lived’.
She and Christos had a long conversation about her grandfather’s story.
Christos told her things he knew from the locals about the period. In the end,
Christos offered her as a gift a copy of the photograph of her grandfather; she said
that if he saw the photograph he would remember and tell her even more. After
some months, Christos received a small package by mail from this woman. It was
a DVD of her grandfather talking to her about his time in Ikaria, along with some
old photographs of his.
This story suggests that, in the context of this shop, the photographs circulate
as objects – valued ones, with potential personal linkages. At least in relation to
the exiles and their families, and to locals and theirs, they could be considered
‘inalienable’ – a term often used by anthropologists (see Mauss 1990; Weiner 1992;
Godelier 1999) about objects that are not to be sold, but only exchanged or passed
on as gifts to specific persons or institutions. In other words, while to some people
the photos are ‘plain commodities’,8 if you will, bought for their aesthetic value,
the photographs in Christos’s shop constitute a very particular kind of inalienable
possession for particular groups of people. Housing these inalienable objects,
the shop works as a familiar place of memory, a social setting for the collective
recreation of local history, and in that sense, as an informal, mundane museum.
8
This example is close to what Herrmann (1997) observes in the US garage sale: people do not
just sell and buy commodities but they form a web of social relations in which they exchange personal
possessions. In the example of the photographs in Ikaria this goes beyond in that the exchange does
not involve money at all. The give and take is outside the logic and practice of the market as well as of
the collectors’ exchanges.
The process of redistribution makes the photographs also social property. The
photos circulate – without money as an intermediary – among people who share
a given moral value and sense of political testimony in Greek society. Former
exiles, their descendants or locals who own photographs, trust Christos with this
material because they are convinced that he recognises not only the testimonial
these photos are making vis-à-vis the civil war, but also the emotional value these
artefacts have for them and their families. They trust that he deals with them in a
meaningful and non-commercial way. In turn, Christos trusts those who are truly
interested in and sensitive to his archive. These photographs are not circulated
by the norms of the market or exchanged among collectors. Their circulation is
based on an interpersonal relationship of appreciation and trust. Thus, we have
another kind of exchange that is based on the interpersonal relationship developed
between two social actors. The exile photograph works as another gift that renews
the bond between the exile (or his descendant) and the local giver or recipient.
This is not to say that the exhibited and exchanged photographs function
as fetishes: Christos is not concerned with having the originals. Rather, he is
concerned with the social circulation of this history. For him, the photographs do
not stand only for the persons depicted per se. They serve as a social opportunity,
providing a context for the creation of a bond, an interpersonal linkage among
former exiles and their descendants with the local community.
On another occasion, the son of a former exile came with his adolescent son
on a ‘pilgrimage’ to Ikaria, to ‘follow in his father’s footsteps’. He had brought
along with him the exile photographs that his father kept at home. ‘I always
wanted to go on this voyage with my father, but we were postponing it year after
year. A few months ago, he passed away and I decided to come and look for
his story with my son’. He went to the village and looked for the family whose
members were depicted in the photographs along with his father. He met them;
they ate together and talked about the period of exile and cohabitation and the
later life of his father. He went to the store to make copies of the photographs to
give to the locals, and so he met Christos, saw more pictures and learned more
about the time of exile on the island. He also offered Christos the photographs
to make more copies for the store.
In such interactions, the memory of cohabitation characterised by bonds of
reciprocity and hospitality becomes a vivid part of social life not only remembered,
but also re-enacted. Hospitality is renewed for the descendants in the manner
in which ancient Greek hospitality developed – through a ‘symbolon’. Symbola
are ordinary objects, such as a piece of pottery that, before the guest’s departure,
were broken, with one half kept by the host and the other kept by the guest. As
Wachterhauser (1999: 100) explains, this symbol ‘was originally given as a gesture
of friendship and hospitality between households that were able to visit each other
only rarely. If some date, far in the future, a descendant of the original recipient
presented this token of friendship, it was acknowledged as a symbol of the accord
and bond of hospitality linking both families over generations’. The recognition of
their ancestors’ relationship of hospitality through the copies and gifts of photos
is thus similar to that of the succession in the relationship of ancient hospitality in

joining the two pieces of the symbolon. Christos’s shop works as the locus of that
memory, providing the topological setting for the exchange of photographs which
contain not just information but also emotion derived from the personal links that
the possession of such an object implies.
My own personal involvement in this process of retrieving and recording
memory adds to the above. In July 2011, I met a Greek historian who told me that
he could give me some visual material that he had obtained from a friend who is
the son of a former exile. He would talk to his informant about my work and ask
permission for me to access his material. Two weeks later, I received an email with
12 black and white photographs from the period of exile in Ikaria. I realised that
I already had one of the photos, which I had received from another former exile
who had given all his photographs from that period to Christos and who lives
permanently on Ikaria. In this picture, the two men were depicted in the fields
with four more exiles, smiling and holding ropes in their hands. On the back of the
photograph was written ‘for wood, Ikaria 1948’.
I concluded that the two men had possibly lived in the same village and that
they knew each other. I started searching into Christos’s digital archive to see
if there were other photographs with the two same men. Indeed, I found two
more photographs with the two of them together. I asked Christos’s permission
to send the scanned pictures to the son of the depicted exile. In addition, I asked
the helpful historian to give me some autobiographical details of the exile, as
well as the contact information of the exile’s son, as I wanted to ask him about
his father’s story. He soon provided me with the contact details of his friend
and asked me to be as careful as possible in asking him about this story. Some
10 years after leaving Ikaria, the depicted exile had died tragically as soon as his
son was born; I would be dealing with not only a social but also a personal and
a family trauma.
The son of the exile, a 50-year-old man, told me that he was moved to see more
photographs of his father, whom he had never met. In the climate of post-civil
war Greece, when political persecution of the Left was still severe, his mother
had destroyed most of his father’s documents after his death, fearing that her son
would continue in his father’s footsteps and become a ‘rebel’, something that she
believed would cause problems and pain in his life. When he was younger, he had
been reluctant to look for more information about his father due to the latter’s
tragic death, and when he was older it had been too late, as most of his father’s
comrades were already dead.
I told him about the former exile who was living in Ikaria and possibly knew his
father because they were depicted together in several photographs. I also told him
about Christos, his collection and how I had already met many exiles’ descendants
who pass by his photography shop. I asked him if he had been to Ikaria. ‘Several
times I thought about it but never decided to go. I didn’t know if I would meet
anyone to tell me about that story. But now, I will try to contact Christos and the
former exile who lives on the island to talk with them’. The next time we talked he
told me that after talking to them, he had decided to go. The former exile was a
friend of his father, and he invited him to stay at his house when he came to visit
Ikaria. The son seemed surprised and moved by the warm communication he had
with his father’s friend. Christos also informed him about the memorial events
related to exile that take place in Ikaria and invited him to participate. The son told
Christos that he would go by the end of August, but due to other obligations, he
was unable to make it. Christos called me and asked for his number, saying, ‘I was
wondering what happened to him, I want to call him to see if he is doing well’.
Since then, their contact has continued, and next summer the son has plans to take
his family and go to the island.
In all the above, we see how the photography shop works as a node, a crossroads
of interests and memories revolving around the period of exile on the island.
Photography is the catalyst, the triggering object around which a large range of
topics are discussed. Not only information related to the past as ‘factual knowledge’
is exchanged, but also ideas, emotions and interpersonal connections of past and
present. In this concrete case, the trauma is re-elaborated, and specific actions are
planned. Through the circulation of his father’s photographs that took place in the
context of multiple relationships based in trust, the former exile’s son decided to
go with his children to Ikaria to get in touch with the former comrade of his father
and renew the relationship with the island and its people.
Ethnography and history-making through photographs
Through this use and exchange of photographs by this interpersonal network,

private memory becomes inter-subjective. Furthermore, the gesture of locating
and exhibiting these pictures in the semi-public space of the store turns them into
constitutive elements of the collective memory of the community – a community
spread across Ikaria and all of Greece.
This ethnographically-informed account of Christos’s photography shop and
collection sheds light on the lived experience of collective memory-making through
photographs. ‘Lived history’ can thus involve photographs as objects that affect the
people who keep, look at and exchange them in deep personal and social ways. The
photographs function as inalienable objects, mediating people’s present as well as
their past as they engage in a whole world of values and meanings transmitted by
social interaction. They are significant elements – if not agents – of a specific form
of life (Wittgenstein 2009: 22) that treat the past as an important and vivid part
of the present in the context of everyday, informal encounters and interactions
among people. Christos’s photography shop works as a casual museum: a social
setting for the recreation and elaboration of inter-subjective memories in the flow
of quotidian life. The related interactions vis-à-vis the past show us the attitudes,
the sentiments and the affective bonds of family and friendship as a whole world
of relations that informs us about lived experience, as well as about the role of the
photographs in shaping historical identities in the context of daily life.
In functioning as much more than documentary evidence, but also as inalienable

objects evoking memories loaded with values and emotions, these photographs are
crucial in the shaping of collective memory and historical consciousness. In such
cases, photographs not only offer important information for ‘grassroots’ history-
making. They also re-create history by carrying and transmitting meanings and
feelings that people elaborate in the process of making sense of their past, their
present and their future through photograph-centred social interactions.
References
Bareli, M. (2008), ‘The Ikarian paniyiri: Issues of Social Reproduction and Change’,
paper prepared for the International Conference ‘Cultural development: an
opportunity for territorial planning?’ Nîmes University, http://www.academia.
edu/1034208/ (accessed 7 August 2013).
Birtles, B. (2002), Εξόριστοι στο Αιγαίο. Αφήγημα πολιτικού και ταξιδιωτικού
ενδιαφέροντος, Athens: Filistor.
Close, D. (1995), The Origins of the Greek Civil War, London: Routledge.
Dalianis, D. (1999), Το σανατόριο εξορίστων Ικαρίας 1948–1949, Larissa: Ella.
Georgiadis, M. (2004), «Στα χρόνια της συμφοράς». Αναμνήσεις από την εξορία. Αϊ
Στράτης-Μακρόνησος, 1947–1950, Kavala: Istoriko kai Logotechniko Archeio
Kavalas.
Godelier, M. (1999), The Enigma of the Gift, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gritzonas, K. (2001), Ομάδες συμβίωσης: η συντροφική απάντηση στη βία και τον
εγκλεισμό, Athens: Filistor.
Halbwachs, M. (1952), Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Hermann, G. (1997), ‘Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the U.S.
Garage Sale?’, American Ethnologist 24(4): 910–30.
Kalo, K. (1998), Όσα δεν πήρε ο άνεμος. Η αυτοβιογραφία μιας θεατρίνας, Athens:
Agras.
Kamarinou, K. (2005), Τα πέτρινα πανεπιστήμια. Ο αγώνας για τη μόρφωση στις
φυλακές και στις εξορίες, 1924–1974, Athens: Synhroni Epohi.
Karimalis, S. (1992), Η Νικαριά στην Αντίσταση και στις φλόγες του εμφυλίου
πολέμου, Athens: Efstathiou.
Kassimatis, M. (2002), Ενθύμιον εξορίας, Athens: Etherovamon.
Kenna, M. (2001), The Social Organisation of Exile: Greek Political Detainees in the
1930s, Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic.
Lountemis, M. (2000), Το κρασί των δειλών, Athens: Ellinika Grammata.
Mamoulaki, E. (2008), ‘Memories of cohabitation and exile: the case of Ikaria
Island’, unpublished MA Thesis, University of Barcelona.
Mamoulaki, E. (2011), ‘Εθιμικές και ιδεολογικές μορφές αντίστασης: η συμβίωση
ντόπιων και εξορίστων στην Ικαρία 1946–1949’, in Κριτική διεπιστημονικότητα:
κοινωνικές διακρίσεις, Athens: Nissos, 85–104.
Margaritis, G. (2002), Ιστορία του ελληνικού εμφυλίου πολέμου 1946-1949, 2 vols,

Athens: Vivliorama.
Mastroleon-Zerva, M. (1986), Εξόριστες. Χίος, Τρίκερι, Μακρόνησος, Athens:
Synhroni Epochi.
Mauss, M. (1990), The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies,
London: Routledge.
Mavroyorgis, C. (1996), Οδοιπορικό στο κακοτράχαλο μονοπάτι, Athens: n.p.
Mazower, M. (ed.) (2000), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family,
Nation, and State in Greece, 1943–1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Melas, I. (2001), Ιστορία της νήσου Ικαρίας, Athens: n.p.
Morris-Suzuki, T. (2005), The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, London:
Verso.
Nora, P. (1989),‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations
26: 7–24.
Oikonomopoulos, P. (2004), Οι εξόριστοι, Athens: Ardin.
Panourgia, N. (2009), Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State,
New York: Fordham University Press.
Papageorgakis, S. (2003), Η Ικαρία στη θύελλα, Athens: Synhroni Epochi.
Papailias, P. (2005), Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Papalas, A. (2005), Rebels and Radicals: Icaria 1600–2000, USA: Bolchazy-
Carducci.
Ricoeur, P. (2004), Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago: University Chicago Press.
Sarantopoulos, A. (2000), Οι εξόριστοι στον εμφύλιο, Athens: Zaharopoulos.
Staveri, O. (2006), Το μαρτυρικό τρίγωνο των εξόριστων γυναικών: Χίος-Τρίκερι-
Μακρονήσι, Athens: Paraskinio.
Theodorakis, M. (2000), Οι δρόμοι του Αρχαγγέλου, vol. II, Athens: Kedros.
Tsakiris, K. (1996), Σίκινος. Αναμνήσεις από την εξορία 1936–1941, Athens:
Odysseas.
Voglis, P. (2002), Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War,
New York: Berghahn.
Wachterhauser, B. (1999), Beyond Being: Gadamer’s Post-Platonic Hermeneutical
Ontology, Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Weiner, A. (1992), Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2009), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Yagourtas, G. (2004), Η οικονομική ζωή της Ικαρίας από τα μέσα του 19ου ως τα
μέσα του 20ου αιώνα. Η παραγωγή και η εμπορία της σταφίδας, Athens: Maistros.
15
Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images:

Photographic (Re)engagements in
Sfakia, Crete1
Konstantinos Kalantzis
Such are the two ways of the Photograph (…): to subject its spectacle to the civilised code of
perfect illusions, or to confront in it, the wakening of the intractable reality.
Roland Barthes2
This chapter re-engages photography at two levels. First, it looks at how

people in a rural peripheral society, which has been excessively photographed
throughout the twentieth century, negotiate and (re)engage their own visual
representation. Second, it examines photographs as a means of re-thinking
and re-envisioning the social relationship between locals and (urban) cultural
producers. The chapter focuses on photographs and their social lives, arguing
about the centrality of the visual in both the national articulation of Cretan-
ness and the various indigenous engagements with ‘tradition’ and notions of
social worth. The visual is approached as encompassing a wide field of social
practices and also as a rich platform capturing multiple dynamics that may
rupture the formal frameworks of production.
1
I am grateful to Yannis Hamilakis, Philip Carabott and Eleni Papargyriou for the invitation
to contribute to this volume and the conference upon which it is based. The essay benefited from many
insights expressed by colleagues during the conference as well as the very helpful remarks made by the
editors, the reviewers and the copyeditors. I am greatly indebted to Sfakians for engaging with me since
2006. My original fieldwork in Sfakia (2006–07) was financially supported by the AHRC, the UCL
Research Project Fund and the University of London Central Research Fund for which I am grateful.
Finally, I am grateful for the intellectual guidance –provided by Chris Pinney and Charles Stewart
at UCL, as well as the supportive and critical commentary offered by Elizabeth Edwards and the
late Peter Loizos. I am indebted for the support offered by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at
Princeton University, where I had the chance to work on many of these ideas, as a Mary Seeger O’Boyle
fellow (2011–12).
2
Barthes (2000: 119).
313
I take photography to be analytically telling not only at the level of its

semantic content or institutional framing but mostly at the level of people’s
continuous re-engagement and re-possession, which extends or undoes the initial
inscriptions, making images culturally salient objects.3 I am also drawing on an
analytical tradition that recognises the ability of photography to capture and
preserve a multiplicity of poignant details, many of which may even destabilise
the photographer’s original intentions.4 It is the camera’s ‘inclusive randomness’
(Edwards 2001: 6) in capturing whatever occurred in front of the lens that

guarantees an excess of things and dynamics preserved in the frame (Pinney
2011: 86). This excess produces multiple, often unpredictable significations and
embodied experiences by future viewers.
Visuality and Cretan-ness
In the current context, where various commercial and other agents represent Crete
as a sphere that may offer the fascinations, but also aversions, of ‘tradition’, the
mountainous region of Sfakia is continuously assigned to a series of imaginary
positions within the national framework. Drawing on a range of motifs that became
prominent in the nineteenth century, regarding geographical isolation (the idea of
a mountainous ‘enclave’ within the island, cf. Peckham 2003: 89) and masculine
ruggedness, the Cretan and particularly the Sfakian (seen often as Crete’s most
excessive version) emerges, at present, as an evocative male figure who is invested
with notions of authenticity, ‘tradition’, ruggedness, cultural idiosyncrasy and
combative resistance to different forms of perceived (past and present) domination
(Kalantzis 2012; 2014; see also Damer 1989: 1–2; Malaby 2003: 47). Importantly,
this articulation features the visual as an ‘absolute necessity’ (Taussig’s term, 1993:
254), framing Cretan-ness as a visible category. This becomes condensed in the
male figure with a full, often distinctively shaped, moustache, beard, a black shirt
and potentially folk-attire (such as a headscarf, breeches or its older version of
salivaria). There is an incredible proliferation of this figure in contexts ranging
from commercial products to traditionalist practices within Crete.
In national imagination, the notion of visual recognisability, even without the
use of folk ‘traditional attire’, pertains uniquely to Crete. Crete is conceived as
featuring visually discernible men, particularly in its rural hinterland; the place
seen as preserving ‘tradition’. Such a concept of recognisability serves divergent
agendas, while triggering various cultural investments. One may thus find the
visible ‘Cretan’ in local traditionalist enactments, televisual parodies and, most
recently, protests against the austerity measures in Athens which evoke notions
of rugged nativism against the political order (Kalantzis 2012). The condition of
visual recognisability renders those Cretan subjects who embody the archetypical
3
See Appadurai 1986; Thomas 1991; Pinney 1997, 2003; Edwards 2001.
4
See Benjamin 1999: 510; Barthes 2000: 27, 40–45; Edwards 2001: 1; Pinney 2011: 80, 89.
Shepherds as images, shepherds with images 315
visual form classifiable/reducible within national typology, but also opens up

possibilities for them in exercising forms of agency (for example, in encounters
with guests) (Kalantzis 2014).
The question of national recognisability becomes complicated, as visuality is of
immense importance in western highland Crete. I am referring to the significance
attributed locally both to the embodied act of gazing, and to appearance as
a parameter of social worth. Thus, Sfakians describe their area as a realm of
surveillance exercised by their co-villagers. This is a practice about which they

often express exasperation, but also one in which they themselves engage daily,
when carefully observing the movements in space of co-villagers and visitors.
This gazing skill is often presented as a continuation of hunting and shepherding
practices, tacitly placing the object of gaze in the position of prey. At the same time,
certain male characteristics such as moustache thickness, height and blondness
are associated with the worth of agnatic kin groups and admired by both men
and women, even in people whom the interlocutors otherwise dislike and openly
oppose. Appearance is also of special pertinence in contemporary traditionalist
practices. Sfakians often describe, in awe, the transformative effect that ‘traditional
attire’ has on people, rendering them ‘demigods’ or ‘giants’. Interestingly, many of
the visual idioms employed in male traditionalism are, at the same time, anxiously
questioned. The use of traditional attire is often described as incongruous with
the contemporary social practices and bodily traits of the present-day users, while
other idioms, such as the black shirt, worn widely as a marker of Cretan descent,
is presented as a re-invention that violates the Cretan mourning ethos, because it
was supposedly only worn by the bereaved in the past.
In this social context photography is seen as the way to monumentalise
desirable versions of the self, particularly in traditionalist engagements. For
instance, a local friend in his late twenties, not willing to proceed with our hiking
expedition to the high mountains without bringing a camera, had us spend
considerable time in order to travel back and get my own camera at the expense
of losing daylight; a prospect against which he had otherwise starkly warned me.
This is related to the role ascribed to the mountains in those embodied processes
of approaching an idealised past, an issue that deserves further attention.
The use as well as ownership of cameras has been extremely limited for Sfakians
for the greater part of the twentieth century. This points to an inequality within
the Greek ‘visual economy’ (Poole 1997; cf. Tagg 1988: 16) whereby Sfakians
filled the self-representational void by resorting either to Cretan professional
photographers, the tourist market (postcards), photo-books about past and
present Crete or imagery sent to them by passing tourists, travellers, botanists
and archaeologists. In Sfakia, there is certain scarcity, but also immense desire
for images of one’s ancestors, which results in locals enthusiastically searching
for photographs from various sources, which are then taken to professional
urban studios for ‘correction’ and reproduction. These digital ‘corrections’ draw on
previous iconographic practices. Prior to digital photography, professional studio
photographers were commissioned by Sfakians to undertake visual syntheses,
such as the (re)assembly of deceased kin from dispersed images in a new single
frame. Such images can be found today in contexts such as home walls, domestic
photo-albums and tombs.
The photographic scarcity partly accounts for the fact that Sfakians exhibit great
solemnity when looking at the early twentieth-century archival images of their
ancestors that I brought to the field. The practice of using others’ representations
to explore and envision the self has partly subsided, however, owing to the recent
use of (digital) cameras and mobile phones to record locally important social
occasions (hunting or feasting, for example), even if professional photographs still
carry greater value in terms of pictorial clarity and skill.
Sfakians with images
Sfakians’ ascribed role in the dominant national and international realm of

representation particularly draws on their portrayal in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century as highland warriors, fighting against the Ottomans. Within the twentieth
century, specific Sfakian men were used in diverse photographic platforms, ranging
from postcards to imagery used as decoration in public spaces. Interestingly, the
same men were repeatedly photographed throughout the twentieth century by
commercial photographers who visited the area. In addition, the same commercial/
professional photographs of these men have been often re-used by various agents in
an array of contexts within the twentieth century. One may thus encounter a picture
of an old man originally taken by a professional photographer in the late 1980s
in the following locations: on the home-wall of members of his patriline, on the
shelves of the studio owned by the photographers, and finally on the label of a food
product, marketed as produced by rural labour in the Cretan hinterland and sold
in urban markets. In the discussion that follows, I explore the performative social
engagements that occur around, about and inside these images, while considering
the questions of power that are intrinsic to this photographic process.
Photographic enframing
Figure 15.1 displays a postcard produced in the 1980s by a professional

photographer based in Athens, as shown to me by the sitter’s son. He is, in
fact, demonstrating a re-coloured and magnified version of the original. The
postcard depicts a now-deceased Sfakian man from a highland Sfakian village,
called Giorgis Karkanis and locally nicknamed Geraki (for the meaning of
this see below). The original postcard gives no textual information about the
man, enframing him within the national aesthetics of desirable rurality.5
5
On the Heideggerian concept of ‘enframing’ and its analytical usefulness in studies of
colonialism and the role of the visual modality, see Mitchell 1988 and Pinney 2008: 387.
Figure 15.1 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Nikos Karkanis showing me a framed,

magnified picture of his father that was gifted to him by a
kinsman, following the sitter’s death
Source: The author
He is sitting at an outdoor coffeehouse, wearing black clothes and a headscarf that

contrast with his white beard, while holding a komboloi, the beads that are associated
in folk-art and literature with Greek male performances of the self in public space.
The formal staging of the sitter, along with the fact that the picture is sold on various
postcard stands throughout tourist markets in Crete, attests to the power dynamics
at the level of pictorial composition/production. One can interpret this image as
orientalist (Said 1978); an essentialist representation that frames a(n) (anonymous)
sitter, unaware of the future commercial uses of his image, as a representative of
a version of rurality that appeals to the bourgeois imaginary, with its absence of
modern visual ‘noise’ (cf. Fabian 1983: 31). The image is replete with ideologies
regarding the rural man as rooted-in-place. It simultaneously monumentalises and
mutes the subject by representing him as a type, serving notions of palatable and
‘photographically-gentrified’ ‘tradition’ (Grundberg’s term 1999: 74).
My own first encounter with this same image at a Greek restaurant in a

middle-class suburb of Athens some five years before the commencement of my
fieldwork in Sfakia supports the above Saidean interpretation. The image was
mounted on the wall alongside other commercial, recognisable images of Greece.
Interestingly, it was only Crete that was represented as a human figure (Yiorgis
Karkanis standing for the archetypical bearded man), while the other localities
were depicted as inviting landscapes. Even more, during this encounter with the
image, a Greek friend in his early 20s jokingly pointed to the man and identified
him with a kind of savagery that is often playfully associated with Crete at the
national level, especially following recent clashes between Cretan shepherds and
the police, in central highland Crete. The anonymity of the picture not only lent
the man to dominant ideas about locality as a fully knowable category that fits
an apolitical vision of homogeneous nationhood, but even rendered him usable
within a playful idiom of mockery.6 Both the man’s conflation with central Cretan
shepherds and the idiom of bravado that my friend spoke about violated the sitter’s
own self-image, as this was narrated and performed to me some five years later by
his own sons, daughters and co-villagers.
Poetics of recognition
In light of my original impressions of this picture, I was thus immensely surprised

when, early on in my visual ethnography, I presented this postcard to my Sfakian
informants (without knowing who the man was and whether he was from the Sfakia
region) and observed an outburst of enthusiastic responses that identified the sitter
as a subject of personal affect and memory. The sitter’s granddaughters (between
seven and 14 years old at that time) exclaimed repeatedly ‘(this is) Granpa!’ while
other stories about the man’s life and death emerged in the affective space that the
display of photographs produces (cf. Binney and Chaplin 2003; Poignant 1996).
Some months later, I would hear the same enthusiastic exclamation (‘Granpa!’) by
a septuagenarian expatriate Sfakian whom I showed a 1930s archival photograph
of a man in breeches. Such exclamation, even in the peripheral context of a public
photographic viewing, partly breaks with the silence and anonymous typology
imposed by the original photographic and archival practice. In the case of Geraki,
from an anonymous ‘type’ of rural Cretan, the discussed eruption of visual recognition
rendered the man a specific subject with a name (Giorgis Karkanis), a nickname
(Geraki), and personal properties that were recollected during the viewing.
While handing out to Sfakians postcards I had bought throughout Crete,
but also images taken in the mid-twentieth century (from the Benaki Museum
archive), I soon discovered that the performative act of recognition carried
6
On the incorporation of the local into Greek national ideology see also Herzfeld 1982,
2003; Stewart 1989; Peckham 2001; and in relation to Crete in particular, where an argument for an
‘ambivalent incorporation’ is made, see Hamilakis 2006.
tremendous significance. A local friend labelled the inability to recognise (especially

now-deceased) sitters a ‘crime’, while another middle-aged man was repeatedly
castigated for his inability to recognise his own father in a picture that depicted
the man in his youth. The ability to recognise past sitters carried certain cultural
capital, which enhanced or destabilised assessments about the beholder’s already-
established status in the village.
Discussions and recognitions around images in public spheres, such as the
coffeehouse, also brought about unexpected revelations and triggered dynamics that
demanded careful negotiation. While viewing the archival pictures I had brought
to the field, my informants occasionally mentioned stories that were incongruous
with the images’ formal nationalised aesthetics. Among other, these stories would
relate to jocular facets (for example, pranks and embarrassing moments) or aspects
of the sitters’ sexuality; a topic that was otherwise rather absent in Sfakian public
discussions. Following a visual encounter with an archival image, an interlocutor
hesitantly narrated a certain scene featuring a sitter that he had accidentally
witnessed as a child. The scene totally opposed the sitter’s formal photographic
framing as a serene and solemn shepherd.7 My interlocutor emphatically noted
that he had never before said this to anyone. His comment highlights photography
as a field that opens up things otherwise forgotten, negated or concealed in more
official discursive realms (cf. Pinney 2004: 8).
Similar dynamics pertained to the viewing of a late-1930s portfolio that
I presented to locals, by one of the professional photographers who visited
Sfakia. The initial comments about a certain sitter’s visual valour (made by his
descendants) were followed by silences and cautious references, in a gentle tone,
to his entanglement in a blood feud that had been officially resolved, having left
slight traces today, hardly noticeable to an outsider. While the sitter’s descendants
were present, the image triggered another kind of recognition characterised by
silence, as well as careful negotiations among the beholders so as not to insult the
sitter’s present kin. I realised this following a viewing session at the coffeehouse,
when I observed a man being furtively, though acutely, castigated for having asked
the sitter’s son if he recognised another photographed Sfakian, who proved to
have been an opponent of the sitter. The original photographer had encountered
both men before the eruption of the feud, yet the contemporary viewing of the
sitters enacted charged dynamics informed by later historical processes. In its
nationalised official logic, the archive stores and places together men who may have
clashed later in their lives. These clashes emerged now as ‘other histories’ (Pinney
and Peterson 2003; see also Binney and Chaplin 2003). In a similar fashion, a
commercial postcard producer had digitally pasted together two Sfakian men over
a coffeehouse backdrop, as part of his creating-a-palatable-folkland agenda. I was
unaware of such montage, until my informants humorously pointed out that these
men did not speak to each other and could have only been reassembled in an edited
7
Here, as in certain other parts of the paper, I do not extensively write about specific information
in order to protect my interlocutors’ privacy and sensibilities, as well as avoid their identification.
Figure 15.2 Konstantinos Kalantzis, At a corner of the living room. Note the
re-framed postcard on the right
Source: The author
photographic frame. In bringing these pictures to the village, I also encountered

the different versions of what caused and constituted the discussed feuds, based on
my interlocutors’ kin and political relationship to the sitter.
In contrast to the Sfakian man who was unable to recognise his father-as-a-
young-man, another informant whom I gave an early twentieth-century picture of
his grandfather milking sheep (depicted at roughly the same age as the beholder)
experienced intense identification. He thus verbally mixed the subjects, at first by
accident and then purposefully, amusedly claiming that it was himself that was
represented in the image. Photography, here, facilitated pride and desire to merge
with the patriline (cf. Herzfeld 1990). These dynamics were also evident in the local
requests that I reproduce and hand archival images to people. In these requests one
also observes partial questioning of the archive’s legitimacy in storing and financially
managing material, which featured my interlocutors’ own kin and co-villagers.
The Sfakian man who meticulously stared at his grandfather’s image further
speculated about the time of the photographic shooting based on the length of the
sheep’s fleece (that is, the extent to which it had been trimmed). Such speculation
on time was a recurring Sfakian response to imagery and further revealed to me
the importance of beard-growing (that manifests mourning) as a temporal marker.
Figure 15.3 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Two postcards placed on the wall by a

friend of the sitters
Source: The author
Based on the length of the sitters’ beard my informants placed male photographic
subjects in certain phases of their lives (before or after major deaths), putting the
picture in its historical context.
The kinds of indigenous readings that I emphasise above are even more apparent
in the Sfakian uses of different postcards depicting Geraki; uses that eschew and
bypass the original commercial character of the pictures. I located the same postcard
I discuss above, displayed as a familial photograph both at a corner dedicated to
the remembrance of the dead (Fig. 15.2) and the wall of the bedroom, in the house
where two of the sitter’s sons reside. The sitter’s daughter had similarly placed other
postcards depicting the man on the fridge of her Sfakian (summer) house.8
One of Geraki’s co-villagers and friends, a Sfakian artisan, had placed that
same postcard on the wall of his workshop (Fig. 15.3). In this case, we observe
a cultural investment in photography as a means of preserving the presence of
the dead which partly stands against the grain of rationalist rhetoric on death
(cf. Pinney 2011: 12, 142–5; Stewart 1989). The placement of Geraki’s image across
the postcard of another (now-deceased) Sfakian man who was kin related and a
8
For a detailed analysis of such practices (that re-use commercial pictures) and particularly of
their potential in negotiating the power dynamics of the original framing, see Kalantzis 2014.
friend of the sitter, seems to be enacting a continuation of both deceased men’s

dialogue. Hence the artisan said that he placed ‘them together’ (not clarifying
whether he referred to the pictures or the sitters themselves), owing to their close
friendship. The muteness of photography has been supplemented anew here with
a possibility that these men are in a way continuing their social engagement after
their death, having been ascribed a space of their own on their friend’s wall. The
staging of this dialogue among the sitters is also related to the role of sound in
indigenous photographic viewings. Often, the (mute) images furnish lively

performances by Sfakian viewers, who mimic the voices of the deceased sitters
in high-pitched tones, comically transferring their presence to the present, while
underlining the playfulness of the sitters’ character.
The employment of imagery in practices that negotiate death is not necessarily
to be associated with the famous Barthesian preoccupation with photography and
loss (Barthes 2000: 14–15, 31, 90, 92, 96). Sfakians do invoke stories about dying
when encountering deceased photographic sitters. Many of these stories speak
of the sitter’s defiance in the face of death, as in the refusal to undergo medical
treatment. In some ways, the emphasis on such defiance tacitly counterbalances
the widespread Sfakian idea that photographic sitters were complicitly passive
in having their picture taken. As with the iconographic motifs themselves, such
narratives lend themselves to national(ised) conceptions of Crete (for example
in stories about the sitters dancing before dying or risking execution by the
occupying Nazis during the 1940s, in order to save their kin), but also reflect local
sensibilities about death (cf. Malaby 2003: 137–47). Nevertheless, the Sfakian
veneration of photographs of their ancestors also occurs in the context of young
men re-embodying ‘tradition’ (see also Kalantzis 2014). Such employment of
photography can therefore be about reclaiming and revival of history, rather than
a lapse into passive idealisation of the past or lament for its loss (Clifford 1987:
126; Edwards 2001: 11).
It is worth asking why this particular postcard (Fig. 15.1) has been chosen by
so many people as a means of remembering Geraki. At a broader level, postcards
are chosen, among other things, for their availability on the market. People can
thus avoid asking the family for pictures, a request which may entail undesirable
structures of obligation. The unexpected possibilities opening up in a market
context are evident in the enthusiastic invitations of a middle-aged Sfakian woman
who called her kin in the USA, urging them to buy bottles of raki (liquor) which
featured the image of a deceased kinsman. The woman did critique the commercial
photographers for having used a photograph of her uncle without consent, yet
was lured to the possibility that émigré kin may possess the sitter through his
appearance on a commodity.
The question, nevertheless, why Sfakians chose the particular photograph,
rather than any other, as a means of remembering Geraki may be more difficult
to approach verbally, partly because Sfakians do not use the kind of vocabulary
found in academic image-analysis. This picture-use may have more to do with
the ‘habituated physiognomic knowing’ that Walter Benjamin talks about
(Taussig 1994: 209), rather than reasoning based on semantics. Looking at that
image may combine affective memories of the sitter with a certain ‘braiding of
the senses’ that points towards the multi-sensory experience of viewing itself
(Mitchell 2005: 265). These reflections were particularly prompted when I
observed the response of a middle-aged Sfakian woman who was looking at the
postcard under discussion, which was placed on the shelves of the office where
she worked. After a long and silent stare, the woman brought up the thick and
beautiful texture of the sitter’s hair and recalled the one time when she had had
a glimpse of his hair unhindered by the headscarf during an unannounced visit
to his house.
Incidentally, upon closer inspection (Figs 15.1, 15.2 and 15.3) one observes
a tuft of the man’s hair protruding from the headscarf (a possible accident? a
personal motif of self-display?). Such poignant detail evokes a ‘sense of presence’
‘of fingers that had tied’ the headscarf ‘in other times’, to borrow Edwards’s words
regarding a nineteenth-century photograph depicting a bamboo palisade in the
Solomon Islands (2001: 1). It may have been this specific detail, or the way Geraki
held his komboloi, or his playful look as captured by the camera that attracted the
users of this postcard and triggered their complex, synaesthetic experience of
viewing, which Taussig calls ‘tactility of vision’ (1994: 209). Such evocation of
embodied memories was also at play in other photo-viewing sessions, as when
a shoemaker recalled the admirable width of a deceased postcard sitter’s calf.
The lock of hair, escaping the tight arrangement of Geraki’s headscarf can also
be seen as a metaphor of photography’s explosive exposure of that ‘inexplicable
point of incisive clarity’ (Edwards 2001:1) that Barthes called the punctum
(Barthes 2000: 44). The unruly element which ‘fills the image’(ibid.) rendering it
usable in personal spaces beyond the original commercial framework.
Complicating the encounter through photography
Despite the productivity of local cultural investments in commercial photography,

it is important not to lose sight of the power dynamics at play here. Besides,
Sfakians mostly end up resorting to professional imagery, which they partly
recognise as superior to amateur pictures. Of course, as I have argued, their
approaches to photographs are informed by indigenous sensibilities. For instance,
in showing some of my informants a postcard depicting a deceased co-villager,
they all recognised in his (bearded) appearance the fact that ‘he had regrettably
lost his mind’ because of a familial loss. The same postcard was very differently
signified by a Haniot folklorist, who saw the man as remaining ‘exactly like his
village wanted him to be’; ‘a man of the land whose hands smell of sweat and toil’.
There is an obvious discrepancy between the former local response and the latter
generic reading, infused with folklore-studies ideology. Though it is tempting to
see Sfakian responses as distinct/different from national ideology, however, it is
also important to keep in mind that they are also subject to national pedagogy.
Whose pose is it?
The entanglement of local responses with wider ideological forces is poignantly

illustrated in the case of a Sfakian interlocutor who excitedly spotted his father
in one of the photographic corpuses I brought to the field. After exclaiming
‘my father!’, the man explained to me the reason for the sitter’s beard (a recent
death), remembered certain bodily traits, clothing habits as well as his skills
in the mountains, explicated his nickname and finally mentioned that he was
among the ‘few people whom Poulianos found to be purely Sfakian’.
Poulianos was a biologist/anthropologist who visited the Sfakia region
in the 1960s, as part of a grander project of proving the organic continuity
between ancient and modern Cretans. His biological determinism underscores
most nineteenth-century European travellers’ accounts and Greek widespread
nationalist ideas about continuity with antiquity. He is also one of the figures
most often mentioned by Sfakians in their discussions about Sfakian uniqueness.
His authority is invoked to prove that Sfakians are of Doric descent (something
that allegedly differentiates them from other Cretans; Poulianos 2004: 305).
Even more, all locals narrate a story in which the scholar was able to discern a
man (of non-Cretan descent) as not being a Sfakian, merely by looking at him.
Together with Poulianos, locals refer to European travellers (especially Robert
Pashley) to speak about and verify (past) Sfakian valour; a gesture which is also
repeated in local folklore-studies books (see, for example, Geronymakis 1993: 11).
But even the first treatise ever written by a Sfakian (abbot Papadopetrakis) about
Sfakia in the late nineteenth century notes at the outset that we ought to turn
to foreign visitors in order to understand the Sfakian distinctiveness (1971: 14).
Sfakian self-presentations today are also replete with references to the allegedly
fascinated utterances that passing ‘linguists’, ‘photographers’, ‘historians’ and
other non-local figures have expressed during their visits to Sfakia. While
browsing, together with the proprietor, at a corner of a Sfakian coffeehouse,
I found Poulianos’ book, inside which the septuagenarian owner had stored a
photograph of himself, which had been taken and sent by a French tourist. In
this display format we encounter the fundamental condition of Sfakian aesthetic
economy, in which claims as well as visuals about the self hinge on external
cultural producers.
It is important to ask, nevertheless, what is it that takes place in such
encounters between locals and external producers? Are locals merely repeating
what others have made of them? Is this a case of internalisation of cultural
modalities constructed by the elites, manifesting an ontological and political
imprisonment in bourgeois schemata (Herzfeld 1997: 158, 2003; Argyrou 2002:
23)? I have elsewhere critically commented on aspects of this view from the
perspective of indigenous critique, photographic repossession and traditionalist
performance (Kalantzis 2014). Here, I want to investigate how we can use the
visual as a means of rethinking what happens in the meeting between Sfakian
shepherds and bourgeois producers.
On fascination
Let us return to the photograph displayed in Figure 15.1 and particularly the
sitter’s nickname Geraki; a word which in standard Greek means ‘hawk’ and is
often used in Sfakia in conjunction with valorised male properties. Geraki in
Giorgis Karkanis’ case, however, means the son of the ‘old-man’ (Geros). The ‘old-
man’ was the nickname of his own father who was allegedly considered so serious
and wise since his childhood that he was given this nickname. Interestingly, Giorgis
Karkanis’s iconicity in a series of visual formats is a continuation of his father’s
legacy. We encounter textual references to and images of his father in an array
of representations produced by folklorists, photographers and other professional
practitioners. In one relevant case, the musicologist Aglaia Agioutandi, who
visited the Sfakia region in 1953 as part of a folksong-recording project led by the
Swiss ethnomusicologist Samuel Baud-Bovy, claims in her diary/report to have
been ‘affectively moved’ and enormously impressed while listening to him sing
(Agioutandi 2006: 57). Her published travelogue also features a photograph of
the man. In addition, the ‘old-man’ is featured in many of Nelly’s photographs
from her journey in Crete in the late 1930s, commissioned by the Metaxas regime
(cf. Stathatos and Zacharia, this volume). His recurrence in Nelly’s body of visual
work leads one to speculate about her own potential attraction to his manners and
skills, in ways comparable to Agioutandi’s impressions.
These visits to Sfakia by official agents who handled notions of ‘tradition’ at the
national and international level form important moments of exchange between
locals and external cultural producers. Nelly’s and Agioutandi’s stance towards ‘the
old man’ is a sign of the dynamics of lure and fascination, occurring in highland
Crete between urban visitors who are interested in the region and locals who treat
them as guests. The consideration of the observers’ attraction is useful in grasping the
dynamics of desire and admiration in such encounters that destabilise conceptions
of travel merely as an exploitative procession (cf. Bhabha 2004: 102). In the long
tradition of enthused representations produced by urban visitors, one can begin to
explore the effect that rural Cretans have in shaping these representations, even
from the position of the observed subject.9 Enthusiastic does not mean, of course,
entirely exempt from forms of hierarchical understanding, as is testified in certain
popular conceptions that place contemporary Crete in Europe’s cultural past. Such
conceptions were present in some of my non-local interlocutors’ utterances and
even in some of the, otherwise celebratory, books about Crete. But let us look more
closely at the question of the locals’ effect and agency from a visual perspective.
While discussing with one of Geraki’s sons about a postcard that features
a close-up portrait of his father, the man claimed that Geraki ‘played with the
lens’; a statement which in this context means that he was able to manipulate
the photographer and lure him into a self-idealising dynamic. The discussed
portrait depicts Geraki embodying what we could describe as a pensively
9
See, for example, Ivanovas n.d.; Outerbridge and Thayer 1979: 106–29; MacNeil Doren 2003.
mellow expression; his eyes slightly turned away from the viewer, his neatly
tied black headscarf contrasting with his white beard.10 Careful observation
of the man’s posture and stare would support the idea that such an image is
only possible as a result of a complex encounter between the photographer
and the subject. Such an encounter potentially includes a certain closeness
between the two parties, the producer’s sympathy and the sitter’s openness to
being photographed as well as his capacity for embodied display of selfhood,
experienced in positive terms. The son’s emphasis on the sitter’s agency could
also be seen as a partial defence against the potential suspicion (widespread in
this social context) that his father was exploited by the photographers. The son
was also, however, indicating that inside the space of photographic encounter,
Sfakian sitters are able to compel outsiders and perform their social being in
ways that fit their own conceptions.
Amalgamations
A similar dynamic is at play in Nelly’s photographic corpus, which monumentalises

different Sfakians. When discussing her work in Sfakia, I encountered many
positive responses by people, even though locals often scrutinised her staging of
certain pictures as in a photograph of a milking scene that is set in a position
which is normally impossible to milk in, probably in order to use the available
light and the specific backdrop. Such comments critically denaturalised
her images and exposed aspects of her aesthetic and political agenda. Figure
15.4 depicts a man whom my informants recognised as Dourountous Yiorgis
(nicknamed Katsoulogiorgis, owing to his cat-like eye-colour), further providing
a story in which his defiance of danger during WWII led to his execution by
German soldiers. Nelly was certainly imbued with her own (and the regime’s)
political agenda of visualising a certain version of rural folk; an issue deserving
exploration in its own right (cf. Zacharia, this volume). Yet, such a photograph
would have been impossible unless the subject already had his own sensibilities
about male appearance and posing. This image reflects then a point of meeting
between an external Romantic signification and a local ideology and habitus. The
latter have possibly been solidified by the presence of photographers demanding
such photographs, and further by images of this kind, when available to locals in
the absence of their own produced imagery. This is a case of what we could call
cyclical synergy.
10
I was unfortunately unable to reproduce this image here because the postcard producer and
copyright holder did not grant me the relevant permission. His stance could well inspire a different
essay altogether. This is a complex matter involving various legal and other parameters. In any case,
amidst increasing discontent among the sitters’ ancestors about the putative exploitation of their kin,
Greek postcard producers seem growingly reluctant to let their work be re-published and scrutinised in
academic or other venues.
Figure 15.4 Nelly, ‘Man from Sfakia 1939’

When seeing another sitter that Nelly had emblematised in her work, many of
my interlocutors remembered his excessive attention to his appearance. This hints
at the fact that his own self-image collided (and may have been further inflated)
with Nelly’s attempt to locate picturesque local men, suitable for her expositions
and photo-editions (some of which served notions of continuity from antiquity).
Similarly, one of Geraki’s sons noted that his grandfather ‘drew people’ due to his
attractive and hospitable manners, as well as singing capacities. In this comment
he pointed to the entanglement of local notions of worth with the attention that
men received by external producers. Importantly, the son’s comment points to the
fact that certain idioms have existed before the visits, and might have shaped the
form of interaction between the two parties.
The visitors’ fascination predates photography, as is testified by European

travellers’ textual accounts that emphasise Sfakian appearance (see, for example,
Pashley 1989: 178, 253). This is also evident in certain pre-photographic depictions
of Sfakian men, including a drawing portraying Geraki’s own father (‘the old-
man’), most of which were composed by passing urbanites in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Some of these pictures are employed in Sfakian
decorative practices, something that attests again to the appropriation of externally
produced iconography for one’s own self-envisioning. The iconographic motifs

found in drawings and sketches are in some cases strikingly similar to images, taken
some decades later, by professional photographers. Certain poses and themes pre-
exist thus and become entangled in processes of dissemination and reproduction,
especially enabled by photography.
In a similar fashion, a Sfakian émigré had mounted a marble plaque displaying
himself alongside his father on his house’s external wall. The plaque was made
at a workshop that produces tomb memorials (a reminder of photography’s
entanglement in Cretan practices of remembrance). The plaque’s content was
based on two separate photographs that the émigré Sfakian had provided to the
artisan. The picture stresses a motif that I also located in other images, often found
in Sfakian households. In these pictures representatives from two generations of
agnates stand next to each other, stressing their temporal distance, yet social
affinity/solidarity, through the use of specific attire, moustache and beard. While,
thus, in the plaque, the father appears bearded with a headscarf and ‘traditional
attire’, the son is wearing a conventional shirt and has a moustache (appearing
more contemporary than his father). In light of the house-owner’s contentious
relationship to other co-villagers, that is related to the man’s émigré status,
I interpret his display of aesthetic lineage with a ‘traditional’ old-man as a form
of claiming rootedness in place. Similar flagging of rootedness and ‘tradition’
is observable among urban Cretan politicians, but also returning émigrés, who
often bring along, in their campaigns or visits to rural areas, a male (most often
bearded) agnate in ‘traditional’ attire to legitimise their relationship to rural
Crete. This commonly engenders critical remarks by local spectators, who may
deny these returning town-dwellers continuity with place, an issue I cannot
explore here.
Importantly, the Sfakian marble plaque was strikingly similar to an image
taken by Nelly in the 1930s during one of her trips to Sfakia (Fig. 15.5).11
There are many things taking place in that picture, including the right-
side sitter’s blurred hand, which presents the sort of accidental detail that
Benjamin calls ‘tiny spark of contingency’ (1999: 510). It reveals, in this case,
that the man may have been manifesting an objection to the photographic
act (or that particular photographic moment) by shaking his index finger.
11
In this picture, the aesthetic difference between the sitters is also manifested in their attire. While
the right-side sitter is wearing the older version of the vraka, the sitter on the left is wearing a suit and
breeches (gilotes), which allegedly came to Crete in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
Figure 15.5 Nelly, ‘Men from Sfakia 1939’

What I want to ask here is, whose is this visual motif of co-existing kinsmen?
Is it strictly the photographer’s or does it reflect a staging recommended by locals?
What is this picture’s relationship to the plaque and other Sfakian photographs
depicting male agnates in a similar pose? In responding to these questions,
it might be useful to turn to a series of utterances I recorded in Sfakia when
enquiring about photographic portraits of old Sfakian men. These pictures had
been taken by non-local, often non-Greek photographers (including passing
tourists) who later sent them back to the subjects. Different female and male
interlocutors would point to the elements that made the pictures attractive by
fusing their own criteria with those of the photographers. My interlocutors
were explaining the outsiders’ attraction to the photographic subjects and, at
the same time, were also explicating a form of indigenous aesthetic that valued
those same traits. Here, there is certain fusion of voices and embodied aesthetics.
Though it is important to always remember the power flows at play (who
owns cameras, who has the economic and cultural capital in representing and
publicising rurality), the discussed images and social engagements around
them point to processes of production, appropriation and inflation in which
locals are not merely the mute, observed objects.
These processes are particularly expressed in Poulianos’s visit to Sphakia,
in which he reworked and authenticated popular notions regarding Doric

descent that nevertheless preceded his arrival in the area. His appropriation of
local classificatory schemata is particularly apparent in his reproduction of the
Sfakian distinction between kaloseira and kakoseira sogia (respectively, ‘good’
and ‘bad’ patrilines) (Poulianos 2004: 27, 65). These pre-existing ideas were
complicated further through being publicised in his book.
Such external interest, which, through its representations but also its actual
presence in the area, inflates and extends local traits and perceptions, pertains
to the general condition of the Sfakian imagination economy. The visit to
Sfakia by figures such as Poulianos or Robert Pashley should be seen as decisive
moments where the presence of external agents with their own political and
aesthetic agendas affected indigenous notions about the self and locality. This
can be seen as a dialogical process rather than a one-way imposition.
Various studies on technologies of rule in South Asia offer interesting
parallels to this discussion by arguing, among other things, that colonial
classificatory schemata may end up partially constituting the indigenous
conditions and categories they sought to describe (Fox 1985; cf. Cohn 1990;
Inden 1990; Dirks 2001; Pinney 2008: 384). Caste, or notions of ‘martial races’,
are among those categories that emerge at the interstices of the indigenous
and the colonial, as they may have been products of inflation of pre-existing
native conceptions and practices (Fox 1985; Dirks 2001; Pinney 2008: 384).
Poulianos’s or the folklorists’ representations differ, in many ways, from the
British Raj. The above studies of colonial rule are useful, nevertheless, in
exploring questions of efficacy and circularity in classificatory projects that
organise notions of nationality, ethnicity, and so on. Poulianos’s approach could
be seen as a form of positive orientalism, in that the epistemology of the colonial
archive is used in proving not the inferiority of the population measured, but
the integrity and continuity of the national body with its glorified ancestors.
Studies of Indian colonialism also prompt important questions regarding
ambivalence in the agendas of those who represent and classify populations
(cf. Bhabha 2004). The Cretan parallel here would concern not only the
folklorists’ and photographers’ attraction to local aesthetics, but also the Greek
state’s contradictory attempts to impose control on idioms such as blood-
feuds and gun-use. These attempts have been destabilised by political practices
(mostly at the local level, often involving politicians who mediate between the
national and the local) that opposed centralised attempts at mastery (Astrinaki
2013).
Conclusion
This chapter has been partly concerned with the implications of using
photography in ethnographic research (cf. Geffroy 1990; Banks 2001; Binney
and Chaplin 2003; Hamilakis et al. 2009). I have shown, for instance, the kinds
of unexpected things that open up, when my Sfakian interlocutors suddenly
encountered the faces of their ancestors in imagery. I was thus able to hear
and realise local approaches to clashes I would probably not have encountered.
Through photographic engagements, I also realised, early in my research,
the importance of local concepts such as that of kin (particularly agnatic)
resemblance (owing to common characteristics known as sousoumia), evident
in my informants’ speculations about the sitters’ identity. The ethnographic
employment of photography did not only reveal things about Sfakia, however.
Through the exercise of their poignant gaze, Sfakians pointed out things relating
to the photographic process that I had not previously uncovered. These included
comments about how photographers such as Nelly staged certain pictures so as to
suit their own aesthetic-ideological agenda. My informants also made intriguing
comments about the class element in the choice of sitters (related to the
ownership of ‘traditional’ attire) or even questioned their own admiration of the
sitters’ appearance, attributing the depicted aura to the power of the photographic
medium itself. This occurred in moments that undercut the otherwise dominant
veneration of the ancestors, reflecting an oscillation between idealisation and a
more deconstructive stance.
On many occasions, Sfakians used the archival images of their ancestors that
I brought to the field, against the grain of official (local and national) narratives.
But, apart from revealing new issues in images, they also viewed photographs in
light of what they already knew. For instance, they assumed that an obese sitter
was from ‘the lowlands’ (since these areas were, to the disdain of Sfakians, more
prosperous) or argued that a sitter who looked ‘angry’ (manismenos) came from a
village with a reputation for blood-feuds. This oscillation between these two kinds
of engagements nicely highlights Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘physiognomic problem’: the
question of whether the historian learns novel things from the visual or ascribes
to it information retrieved from other sources, which Pinney has emphasised as a
central question for visual anthropology (Pinney 2008: 388). Sfakians debate this
question, even though not in scholarly terms, as when they discussed a certain
image taken by an early twentieth-century photographer, in which one of the
sitters is not facing the camera. An old artisan attributed this to the fact that
the sitter was mourning for the death of his son, and thus purposefully avoided
the lens. Against this imposition of extra-visual information on the image, other
Sfakians argued that the sitter’s pose may have to do with the man’s demeanour,
a moment of disdain or even simply chance.
Among their responses, Sfakians were particularly keen on excluding sitters
as ‘not being Sfakian’. This takes us to the other issue that this essay has explored,
the question of synergy between local traits and the interventions of urban
cultural producers. It will be recalled that Poulianos was fondly remembered

for excluding a man as not being (visibly) Sfakian. The fact that this story was
ubiquitously heard in the region is indicative of how Poulianos’s own attitude
may have positively collided with certain indigenous sensibilities, inflating
them further and adding official legitimisation. In a similar way, the question
of distinct visual characteristics itself became central as part of a Romantic
European privileging of visual taxonomy (cf. Gilman 1985) which merged with
an indigenous preoccupation with appearance as a sign of social worth.

The desire to pinpoint the non-Sfakian sitters also relates to Sfakians’
‘exclusive possessivism’ (Said in O’Hanlon and Washbrook 1992: 157); a stance
that locals perform whenever they experience something they see as theirs
used by putatively illegitimate agents (see also Kalantzis 2012: 11). Thus, two
different interlocutors (a man in his 30s and a man in his 80s) expressed the
desire to tear up images of Geraki found in a restaurant in eastern Crete (which
is seen as not producing men of comparable [visible] worth) because these
pictures made it possible for eastern Cretans to claim Geraki as their own.
As regards the question of synergy, my attempt has been to show that
photography may serve as a fruitful means of complicating what one ‘already
knows’ or assumes about ideological imposition and national hegemony
(cf. Pinney 2008: 388). Imagery, as well as the performative engagements
around it, offer ways to re-think the complex dynamics that emerge in the
encounter between powerful outsiders and rural subjects. Of course, this
encounter occurs within an unequal economy of power, and it is important
to keep in mind that certain agents play a more decisive role than others in
shaping images and aesthetics. Yet photographic representations, but also more
widely projects of aesthetic and ideological pedagogy, are hardly products of a
one-way unproblematic inscription. The producers’ fascination and the locals’
agency are important parameters, which we can disentangle by exploring the
multiple engagements around and inside the visual.
References
Agioutandi, A. (2006), ‘Ταξίδι στην Κρήτη για την Προετοιμασία Φωνογράφησης

Δημοτικής Μουσικής, 31 Αυγούστου-9 Οκτωβρίου 1953: Οδοιπορικό’, in
L. Liavas (ed.), Μουσική Καταγραφή στην Κρήτη: 1953–1954, Τόμος Α΄:
Το ιστορικό και η μεθοδολογία της έρευνας, Athens: Kendro Mikrasiatikon
Spoudon, Mousiko Laografiko Arheio Melpos Merlier, 43–65.
Appadurai, A. (1986), ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A.
Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–63.
Argyrou, V. (2002), ‘Tradition, Modernity and European Hegemony in the
Mediterranean’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 12(1): 23–42.
Astrinaki, R. (2013), ‘“Παράδοση Βίας” και Ιδιώματα Κρατικότητας στις Ορεινές

Κοινότητες της Δυτικής Κρήτης’, in K. Rozakou and E. Gara (eds), Ελληνικά
παράδοξα: πατρωνία, κοινωνία πολιτών και βία, Athens: Alexandreia, 363–401.
Banks, M. (2001), Visual Methods in Social Research, London: Sage.
Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucida, translated by R. Howard, London: Vintage
Books.
Benjamin, W. (1999), ‘Little History of Photography’, translated by E. Jephcott and
K. Shorter, in M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds), Walter Benjamin:

Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931–1934, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 507–30.
Bhabha, H. (2004), ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the
Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 94–102.
Binney, J. and G. Chaplin (2003), ‘Taking the Photographs Home: The Recovery
of a Māori History’, in L. Peers and A. Brown (eds), Museums and Source
Communities: A Routledge Reader, London: Routledge, 100–110.
Clifford, J. (1987), ‘Of Other Peoples: Beyond the Salvage Paradigm’, in H. Foster
(ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture (no. 1), Seattle: Bay Press, 121–30.
Cohn, B.S. (1990 [1987]), An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays,
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Damer, S. (1989), Cretan Highlanders: The Making of the Sphakiot Legend, Centre
for Urban and Regional Research, Discussion paper 37, Glasgow: University
of Glasgow.
Dirks, N.B. (2001), Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Oxford: Berg.
Foucault, M. (2002), The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan
Smith, London: Routledge (first published 1969).
Fox, R.G. (1985), The Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Geffroy, Y. (1990), ‘Family Photographs: A Visual Heritage’, Visual Anthropology
3(4): 367–409.
Geronymakis, K. (1993), Σφακιανή Λαογραφία: Ό,τι Χάθηκε και Χάνεται,
Athens: n.p.
Gilman, S. (1985), Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and
Madness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Grundberg, A. (1999), Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography 1974–1989, New
York: Aperture.
Hamilakis, Y. (2006), ‘The Colonial, the National and the Local: Legacies of the
‘Minoan’ Past’, in Y. Hamilakis and N. Momigliano (eds), Archaeology and
European Modernity: Producing and Consuming the ‘Minoans’, Padova: Aldo
Ausilio/Bottega d’Erasmo, 145–62.

(A Photo-Essay)’, Public Archaeology 8(2–3): 283–309.
Herzfeld, M. (1982), Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern
Greece, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Herzfeld, M. (1990), ‘Icons and Identity: Religious Orthodoxy and Social Practice
in Rural Crete’, Anthropological Quarterly 63(3): 109–21.
Herzfeld, M. (1997), Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State, London:

Routledge.
Herzfeld, M. (2003), ‘Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan
Reflections’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45: 281–310.
Inden, R.B. (1990), Imagining India, Oxford: Blackwell.
Ivanovas, S. (n.d.), Where Zeus Became a Man: With Cretan Shepherds, Athens:
Efstathiadis Group.
Kalantzis, K. (2012), ‘Crete as Warriorhood: Visual Explorations of Social
Imaginaries in “Crisis”’, Anthropology Today 28(3): 7–11.
Kalantzis, K. (2014), ‘On Ambivalent Nativism: Hegemony, Photography and
“Recalcitrant Alterity” in Sphakia, Crete’, American Ethnologist 41(1): 56–75.
MacNeil Doren, D. (2003), The Winds of Crete, Athens: Efstathiadis Group.
Malaby, T. (2003), Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Mitchell, T. (1988), Colonising Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005), ‘There Are No Visual Media’, Journal of Visual Culture
4(2): 257–66.
O’Hanlon, R. and D. Washbrook (1992), ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism,
and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History
34(1): 141–67.
Outerbridge, D. and J. Thayer (1979), The Last Shepherds, New York: The Viking
Press.
Papadopetrakis, G. (1971) [1888], Ιστορία των Σφακίων, Athens: Vardinogiannis.
Pashley, R. (1989) [1838], Travels in Crete, vol. 2, Athens: Karavias.
Peckham, R. (2001), National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics
of Place in Greece, London: I.B. Tauris.
Pinney, C. (1997), Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, London:
Reaktion.
Pinney, C. (2003), ‘Introduction: How the Other Half …’, in C. Pinney and
N. Peterson (eds), Photography’s Other Histories, London: Duke University Press.
Pinney, C. (2004), ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in
India, London: Reaktion.
Pinney, C. (2008), ‘Colonialism and Culture’, in T. Bennett and J. Frow (eds), The
SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, London: SAGE, 382–405.
Pinney, C. (2011), Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion.
Pinney, C. and N. Peterson (eds) (2003), Photography’s Other Histories, London:
Duke University Press.
Poignant, R. (1996), Encounter at Nagalarramba, Canberra: National Library of

Australia.
Poole, D. (1997), Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean World,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Poulianos, A.N. (2004) [1971], Η Καταγωγή των Κρητών: Ανθρωπολογική Έρευνα
στο Νησί της Λεβεντιάς, Athens: Vivliothiki Anthropologikis Etaireias.
Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Stewart, C. (1989), ‘Hegemony or Rationality? The Position of the Supernatural in

Modern Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7: 77–98.
London: Macmillan.
Taussig, M. (1993), Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, London:
Routledge.
Taussig, M. (1994), ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, in L. Taylor (ed.),
Visualising Theory, Selected Essays from Visual Anthropology Review, London:
Routledge, 205–13.
Thomas, N. (1991), Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism
in the Pacific, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

16
Projecting Places:
Personal Photographs, Migration and the
Technology of (Re)location1
Penelope Papailias
As rituals of separation and reunion, emblems of distance and memory, tokens of

absent others and past places, props for nostalgia and memory and prompts for
narratives and self-reflection, photographs and photographic practices have long
been a central product of transnational movement and communication, as well as
a key element in the symbolic infrastructure of migration. As testimonies to self-
fashioning and adventure, records of new selves and new homes, they have figured
prominently in diasporic exchanges. Yet, strangely, despite the fact that photographs
are often used profusely to illustrate accounts of migration, relatively little has been
written about the way that photographic practices mediate migration experience.
In this chapter, I will consider how in the mid-2000s, Albanian and Bulgarian
migrants to Greece located themselves in ‘Greece’, but also in the ‘world’, through
the production, dissemination and collection of personal photographs. The first
part of the chapter treats the photograph as a material object and explores the
role of photographic practices in the constitution of family networks, personal
archives and homes-in-migration. The second part looks within the frame of
the photograph and considers how subjects placed themselves against particular
backdrops as a comment on their relation to the communist past in their home
countries, contemporary global consumer society, national ideologies and cultural
conventions. This interpellation of the self into public discourse was not an
unproblematic gesture, but a site of ambiguity and negotiation, in which the
subjectifying and objectifying dynamics of the photograph came into tension.
1
I would like to thank Burbuqe Durresi, Florin Gjokaj, Aris Losis, Yonka Yankova Nencheva,
Teuta Sadiku and Vaso Skentra, for sharing their personal photographs. I am particularly grateful to
Lambrini Styliou and Alexandra Siotou for their participation in this research and to Anthi Tsirogianni
and Themis Dallis for their technical assistance.
337
Finally, I examine how ‘Greece’ as backdrop in these photographs was visually

coded in relation to discourses of global capitalist modernity and staged for
re-presentation in the migrants’ countries of origin. Focusing on the backdrop, we
can see an ongoing negotiation not only of migrants’ place in Greece, but also of
Greece’s place in the world. We have heard much of how Greeks viewed migrants
in the 1990s and 2000s, but much less about how migrants themselves saw Greece
during this period.
Ethnography in the photo album
The corpus of personal photographs discussed in this paper was collected in the
context of an interdisciplinary research project carried out between 2004 and 2007
by anthropologists and historians in the Department of History, Archaeology
and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly.2 For this project, we
documented semi-structured life stories from 44 Albanian and 16 Bulgarian
migrants then living and working in the coastal city of Volos (population 125,000).
This research, which focused on migration and gender, had three central themes:
work, historical culture and intercultural communication. In addition to gender,
we also considered generation and ethnicity as critical parameters shaping and
differentiating migration experience.
The photo project was conceived as a supplement, even a corrective, to the
life-story interviews that formed the core of the research. Photographic practice
illuminates aspects of gender performativity inaccessible through a logocentric
methodology. Feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to film and photography
(Mulvey 1975; Doane 1991; Jones 2003) have long drawn attention to the
significance of the camera as a cultural apparatus in power-laden processes of
objectification and subjectification centering on, and producing, the gendered
and racialised body. Indeed it would be impossible to think about the production,
reproduction, performance and contestation of gender identity, as well as the
dynamics of desire, fantasy, identification and rejection that animate these
processes, without reference to practices of looking, the idea of self-image and
visual culture more generally. In this respect, personal photographs constitute
uniquely rich cultural artifacts, which document how subjects situate themselves
over time in relation to normative local poses of gender, sexual and class propriety,
as well as in dialogue with global mass media cultural icons. It is these kinds of
exercises – a two-pronged process of ‘self-distancing’, on the one hand, through
projecting oneself (or having oneself projected) into the world of images and
‘self-recognition’, on the other, involving seeing oneself in the image produced
– that define mediation and make it so central to the constitution of subjectivity
2
The research project ‘Gendered Aspects of Migration in Southeast Europe: Integration, Labor,
Transcultural Communication’ (GAME) was funded by the European Union Pythagoras Research
Program (EPEAEK II). For more details, see http://extras.ha.uth.gr/pythagoras1/en/index.asp.
Projecting Places 339
(Mazzarella 2004). We found that for our interviewees looking at old photographs
and juxtaposing them to newer ones led them to historicise gender conventions
and reflect on their migration ‘makeover’ in relation to other aspects of their lives,
such as work and consumption.
This historicising potential of the personal photograph made it particularly
valuable for our research into historical culture and memory. For one, the
ordering and re-ordering of photographs into albums and narratives in itself
enacts memory, demonstrating how the past is continually repositioned in

relation to the present as well as the envisioned, or at least desired, future. We
saw this process at work in various sites: in albums made years ago, in albums
broken apart to form new image assemblages and, of course, in the photo-
narrative co-constructed during the interview itself. Given that the photograph
mediates between personal memory and public history, looking at personal
photographs also contributed to our research on historical culture (in both the
migrants’ country of origin and in Greece). As Roland Barthes has pointed out,
photography, as a quintessential technology of modernity, provided a new way
to ‘see oneself (differently from in a mirror): on the scale of History’ (1981: 12).
An example of how photography afforded (or imposed) participation in national
historical narratives is the ‘ceremonial dress’ photograph (Kuhn 1995: 62) taken
during state commemorative rituals. The clothes worn (traditional costume, army
uniform) in such photographs are always ‘greater’ than the wearer. The degree to
which our interviewees recognised (or refused to recognise) themselves in these
kinds of photographs proved an informative commentary on their relation to
national mythologies and social conventions (especially gender roles).
In addition to informing the research more generally, the photo project
was conceived as a separate case study within the thematic of ‘intercultural
communication’, which concerned the role of technologies in the formation of
transnational networks, the exchange of cultural products and the emergence of
new forms of cultural identification. Interview methodology proved particularly
limiting for this topic. While questions about communist policies or contemporary
work experience prompted elaborate, often impassioned, narratives, asking people
about practices of watching television or the use of cellphones usually resulted
in brief responses. The request ‘Could you show us and tell us about your
photographs?’, however, did generate long and lively conversations, especially
since our interviewees for the most part had never before shown their photos to
acquaintances in Greece. Inquiring into the social contexts of these photographs’
production and circulation also provided us with some insights into practices
related to photography as a particular kind of cultural technology.
We ended up videotaping a total of six interviews, two of which were conducted
with people we had interviewed for the main research project. For these interviews,
we deliberately decided to speak with first-generation migrants between 30 and 50
years of age who had memories – and often photographs – from the communist
period in their home countries. Thus, we were able to consider continuities and
discontinuities in photographic practices between the communist period and the
post-communist ‘transition’, which for most of the interviewees coincided with

their migration to Greece. In contrast to the younger generation, people in this
age group were in much more frequent contact with family members in their
countries of origin, as well as with relatives who had emigrated to other countries.
Photographs figured prominently in this communication.
In order to make our interviews more interviewee-, than interviewer-directed, we
asked interviewees to select the photographs they wanted to share with us. Given the
emphasis of qualitative studies of migration, including our own, on elicited testimony,

this approach allowed for a more proactive role on the part of the interviewee.
Of course, these were not photo-narratives constructed independently (for instance,
for a personal web profile or as part of a cultural association archive), but ones shaped
in response to our intervention: that is, by the topics that interviewees thought might
interest us and by what they felt comfortable revealing about their personal lives.
Still, the photographs they showed us often led the conversation in directions that
we had not thought of proposing. After reviewing the interviews, we selected specific
photographs to scan for our archive and to exhibit on the program website paired
with extracts from our larger corpus of interviews.3
I should note that none of the people we interviewed was then using a digital
camera or sending images to friends and family electronically through the internet
or text messaging. Nonetheless, their photographic practices were prescient of
the intense reflexivity of digital late modernity. Topics that have been discussed
in relation to online photosharing (Palmer 2010), including the communicative
function of the shared photograph, the imperative to document a continuous
process of transformation and self-improvement through a visual ‘timeline’ and the
virtuality of the family photo album, prove extremely relevant to the photographic
practices of migrants.
Making place: network, archive, home
When Susan Sontag noted that photographs ‘help people take possession
of a space in which they are insecure’, she referred specifically to the parallel
development of photography and tourism (1977: 9). While, as we shall see,
the conventions of tourism photography strongly inform migrants’ images of
Greece, migration creates an unfixing of home and an insecurity of place of a
quite different order than tourism. In the context of this more radical relocation,
photographs can serve as a fundamental expression of belonging – or of ‘longing
to belong’ (Probyn 1996: 8) – to the new place. At the same time, photographic
practices are integral to maintaining connections to people and places in the
3
See http://gendermigration.ha.uth.gr/el/index.asp. The full archive of photographs and
interviews is held by the Laboratory of Social Anthropology, Department of History, Archaeology and
Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, which has granted permission for the reproduction
of the photographs in this article.
subjects’ past. Much has been written about the connection between writing
and exile and the way that writing creates a stage on which the ‘I’ can move
about, but certainly for those ‘dwelling-in-travel’ (Clifford 1994), the mobility
of the photographic archive has rendered it an integral technology of diasporic
subjectivity.
This focus on strategies of dwelling and belonging problematises the
overemphasis on mobility, as the opposite of fixity, in studies of globalisation
and migration. Challenging the notion that ‘home’ is simply left behind by
migrants who exchange a former ‘rooted belonging’ with a ‘rootless mobility’, this
re-grounding of home – a process of ‘homing’ – has been identified as a critical
component of mobility and one in which much effort, both affective and material,
is expended (Ahmed et al. 2003). In our research, photographic practice emerged
as a central technology for a kind of cosmopolitan home-making that challenged
temporal, spatial and ideological conflations of the home with a physical house or
a national homeland (either of origin or assimilation).
Migrant photographic practices also have the potential to intervene
productively in more general theoretical discussions about photography
by emphasising the place-making function of photography and the role of
the photograph as a virtual place. Theoretical writings on photography are
overwhelmingly focused on time and, thus, on the relation of the photograph to
memory, mourning and death. In his influential Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
likens cameras to ‘clocks for seeing’ (1981: 15): the shutter’s click, like a bell,
freezes an instant of time, embalming ‘life’ in preparation for an inevitable death.
While Barthes concludes that photographs block memory in severing the past
from the present instead of making it continuous (1981: 91), other writers whose
work I draw on here have examined the photograph’s cultural function as an
artifact of a past presence centrally entwined in personal and family memory
narratives (Kuhn 1995; Hirsch 1997) and material constructions of remembrance
(Batchen 2004). Yet, the undeniable centrality of the temporal in discussions of
photography overshadows the fact that spatiality and the experience of absence
through physical separation and distance (not just through death and the passage
of time) clearly constitute critical conditioning factors in the making and viewing
of photographs.
Given that photographs both negate and underscore distance, they could not
but figure prominently in migration experience and in the rituals, as well as the
everyday communication, engaged in by transnational networks of friends and
family. Indeed, in the context of migration, photographs are often incorporated
into other media of deterritorialisation, such as letters, e-mails and text messages.
As a result, the epistolary aspect of the photograph is heightened in relation to
its referential content. As in films made by exiles, which frequently feature letters
and telephone calls within their plots, address emerges as a central problematic
(Nacify 2001: 5; cf. Kunreuther 2006). In other words, from an anthropological
perspective, the issue is not just what a particular photograph depicts, but to whom
it is addressed and by whom it is viewed.
Figure 16.1 The photo album Florin Gjokaj sent home to his parents with
photographs from 1993 to 1995
As we soon learned from our conversations with migrants, the photographs

they initially produced in Greece were made with dissemination as a primary
motive, not an afterthought. Many described the urgency they felt during their
first years in Greece to send photographs back to their families. Cameras were
usually one of the first items of technology they secured for themselves in Greece.
As opposed to first televisions, which were often secondhand castoffs, ‘inherited’
from employers, cameras seemed to be worth buying new. Teuta Sadiku, a 40-year-
old woman from Albania, told us that within only two or three weeks of her arrival
in Greece she and her husband had purchased a camera to take photographs to
send home so that their families could ‘see them’.
The year after he migrated to Greece from Albania, Florin Gjokaj made a photo
album in two copies: one to keep for himself and the other to send to his family
(Fig. 16.1). Describing the intense nostalgia he felt at the time, Florin, who was in his
mid-30s when we spoke, explained: ‘Those first years, when I left Albania, I felt that
I had lost a piece of myself, that I was missing something. I cried so many times … I
wanted to send a message up to Albania’. Indeed, in many photographs, Florin seems
to be looking beyond the photographer and the in situ audience, addressing imagined
viewers back home and infusing the photograph with their ghostly presence. One
wonders if in sending the album to Albania, Florin did not also want to insure that
he was not forgotten, that he could save a place for himself there.
The materiality of the photograph (Edwards and Hart 2004) is integral to its
place-making function. As the example of Florin’s album suggests, making, bestowing
and displaying photographic objects can be a bid to hold a place for an absent other by
taking up physical – and symbolic – space (propped on a mantel or desk, exhibited on a
wall or projected as a ‘screensaver’). Given that photographs can publicise a significant,
sometimes exclusive, connection to others whom the exhibitor of the photograph
does not want to forget (or is not socially allowed to forget), photographs tend to be
ritually retrieved from drawers and hard drives (or concealed) when particular visitors
show up. Of course, they can also be easily destroyed or simply forgotten.
As many commentators have pointed out, photographs, as objects that invoke
the absent object of desire, have a talismanic quality and can be emotionally, even
erotically, charged markers not only of a past moment, but also of a past presence.
This is why photographs, as media that bridge spatial, not only temporal, distance,
constitute such salient currency in love affairs. As Geoffrey Batchen (2004) has
shown, photographs as objects and the various other, often incredibly elaborate,
objects in which they have been incorporated and conjoined (frames, albums, texts,
photo-jewellry, sculptures, fabrics) have often played the role of ‘forget me nots’ in
mourning and mating rituals alike. Photographs can be worn on the body (from
the Victorian locket to the wallet insert or cellphone screen), a fetishistic token
that stands in for lovers in their absence.
Batchen (2004: 31) suggests that it is the combination of the haptic and the
visual that makes the photograph such a compelling and contradictory form: in
the photograph, the fleeting and extraordinary moments, as well as the fantastical
reveries, associated with the image acquire a tangibility and presence that can be
easily incorporated into the everyday world of the domestic interior. Vaso Skendra,
a 40-year-old migrant from Albania, for instance, showed us a 1983 picture she
had sent to her husband when she first met him. In turn, he had decorated the
photograph with a flower decal and written ‘my love’ on the back. The photographic
object as fetish combines the metonymical (the photograph was produced through
contiguity with the photograph’s subject as light deflected from her/his body entered
the camera apparatus) and the metaphorical (the photograph comes to represent
that person, like the characteristic photograph of a Hollywood star or the religious
icon of a saint), thus potentially acquiring a magical power to protect, as well as a
sexual charge (Metz 1985: 86).
In the context of migration and exile, the desire generated by absence often
moves beyond the realm of lovers to take on a more ‘communitarian’ (Nacify 2001)
aspect in which longing is expressed toward the family and the nation. Teuta told
us that her mother keeps all her old photographs in a big sheet and likes to remind
her that ‘she has her in there’. As a surrogate for the missing other, the photograph
can be gazed at, held, fondled and even kissed: Teuta said her mother opens up
the bundle when she is overwhelmed by nostalgia and kisses her daughter’s image.
During our interview, Burbuqe Durresi, a migrant from Albania in her fifties, kissed
a photograph of herself in the coastal town of Saranda, pronouncing ‘Saranda, my
love’. She also exclaimed ‘Hoxha, my love’, when we came across a photograph of her
standing in front of a monument of the former communist dictator of Albania, Enver

Hoxha. In this love affair with the state, Burbuqe might provide an extreme example
of the communitarian dimension of diasporic media. She grew up in an orphanage
with the state as de facto parent; even her name, ‘Burbuqe’ (blossom) ‘Durresi’ (after
‘Durrës’, the city in which she was born) linked her organically to her homeland.
For migrants who had given up on the idea of return – at least in the immediate
future – the initial movement of photographs ‘up’ to Albania tended to be replaced,
or at least complemented, by a movement of photographs ‘down’ to Greece. After

a few years in Greece, Florin explained that not only did his nostalgia for Albania
abate, but also during trips back to Albania he felt nostalgic for his life in Greece.
He stopped sending photographs home regularly, sensing that these images in
which he seemed happy and comfortable in his new surroundings would actually
make his parents lose hope he might one day return. He never made a second
album for his parents and during trips to Albania started to take photos ‘back’ with
him to Greece. Although Teuta initially came to Greece with just a small bag and
no photos whatsoever, over time she has brought many photographs to Greece,
creating a collection that she tellingly referred to as her ‘dowry’, underscoring the
photographs’ value as a marker for social place, gendered propriety and property
difficult to maintain or re-establish under conditions of migration.
It might not be an exaggeration to say that ‘home’ is where one keeps one’s
photographs. As key components of personal archives (Papailias 2005: 11),
photographs-as-objects make place. Whether in albums, desk drawers, shoeboxes,
or on hard drives and the internet ‘cloud’, photographs are usually the sentimental
cornerstone of these ongoing – and always incomplete – attempts to anchor, if only
temporarily, the self somewhere (or in various places) through a process of temporal
accumulation, ordering and deletion. For Burbuqe, who has no family to come home
to and no current partner or children of her own, photographs formed the carapace
of her ‘mobile home’. While others talked about photographs as something that
they did not think about bringing with them when they first came to Greece, for
Burbuqe photographs were among the basic items in her travel bag. As she remarked,
‘Wherever I go, I first bring with me my photographs, not even my clothes’. The fact
that older female Bulgarian women, who were often in Greece alone working to
support children and grandchildren in Bulgaria, did not have with them any, or just
a few, old photographs coincided with their firm plans to repatriate.
Although Teuta spoke jokingly of ‘stealing’ old photographs from her mother’s
closely guarded collection, she specified that she was taking duplicates. As the
quintessential copy-without-original, the photograph, much before the digital age,
could be incorporated into different, even conflicting, narratives and archival orders.
The double or quadruple copies that photographers routinely gave their customers
in communist Albania could even be said to have encouraged dissemination, while
migration clearly has provided the impetus for their further geographic dispersion.
This sharing of the ‘same’ photograph, of course, undermines the fiction of the
archival original and of a singular physical repository, while creating a virtual third
place – neither here nor there.
Figure 16.2 Yonka Yankova Nencheva’s family back in Bulgaria, toast to her in
Greece on New Year’s, Plovdiv, 2007
Source: Personal archive
Rather than positing an ultimate ‘home base’ for these photographs, it is, thus,
more fruitful to focus on their trajectories and the way photographs etch networks
of connection (or attest to disconnection) as they move (or not) across borders.
In the case of the people we interviewed, this usually was upon the person of
a visiting relative or friend, and more rarely in the mail, which was considered
unreliable. Vaso showed us a picture of a sister’s wedding that she could not attend
because she did not then have papers, while Aris Losis, a 30-year-old migrant
from Albania, told us he sent extra copies of the photographs and DVD of his
baptism to his family in Albania. Yonka Yankova Nencheva, a 50-year-old woman
working in Greece to support her daughter and child back in Bulgaria, was sent
photographs from the New Year’s celebration in Bulgaria she could not attend
because her employers had not paid her Christmas bonus on time (Fig. 16.2).
This ongoing process of ‘seeing and being seen’ constitutes a critical means of
keeping a dispersed family ‘together’. As anthropologist Barbara Wolbert has
pointed out in a study of personal photographs of a Turkish migrant family in
Germany taken in the 1970s and sent home in letters, the production and viewing
of these photographs did not just allow for the virtual reunion of the family, ‘rather
photography itself [was] the enabler of the unity in the first place’ (Wolbert 2001: 24).
Sometimes, the only place in which transnational families separated by migration
ever ‘meet’ is in this photographic traffic. A poignant example also can be found in
composite photographs of Greek families, which were common in the first part of
the twentieth century. In these photographs, individual portraits of missing family
members (whether migrated or dead) are affixed to group photos of the rest of the
family. In some cases, the youngest children in these family portraits might never
have met their older siblings in person. The often glaring signs of montage ‘suturing’
in these photographs demonstrate the desire to hold together a narrative of family
continuity, as much as the reality of separation and of lives lived apart.
Of course, many have argued (Bourdieu 1990; Hirsch 1997, 1999) that
photography, which was marketed from the outset as an affordable, easy-to-
use technology ideal for documenting and memorialising family life, created
the mythologies of the modern middle-class family in the first place. Critical
scholarship on family photographs has shown how photographs can be used to
identify dominant ideologies of family in different historical and cultural contexts,
but also how such photographs can be read against the grain to reveal ‘family
secrets’ (Kuhn 1995) and track the tensions and resistances to socially prescribed
poses and relationships. What diasporic photographic practices potentially add
to this discussion, in the pathos with which they expose the family portrait as
fantasy, is a denaturalising not just of the patriarchal, heterosexual family (many a
family photograph can do this), but also of the physical home (inside the walls of
which we are supposedly ‘present’ to each other) and the homeland (of nation and
culture) as necessary preconditions for family.
Indeed, for some of the people with whom we spoke, migration – and with it
the chance to construct a personal photographic archive – created the possibility
they otherwise might not have had to sever their personal histories from limiting,
even oppressive, narratives of biological family and national history. The first
photograph that Florin showed us was also the first photograph he chose to have
taken of himself: he remembers that the photographer was reluctant to take the
picture because his parents had not contacted the photographer beforehand and
he feared little Florin might not pay him. Florin became somewhat flustered
later in our conversation when we asked him if he could show us a photograph of
his parents. It soon became clear that he had not brought such photos ‘down’ to
Greece. He also had not brought photographs of himself as a baby or young child
objectified by the parental gaze. The life narrative he unfolded for us through his
photo album was one of self-becoming, not anchored to a ‘family frame’ (Hirsch
1997), but a bachelor’s story centered on relations with friends and lovers, thus,
defying the notion often treated as a default in studies of migration that the family
forms the ‘primordial ethnic network’ (Fortier 2000: 4). Self-focused migrant image
assemblages such as Florin’s, in fact, resonate with contemporary practices of online
image culture that emphasise the constant ‘updating’ of a personal ‘profile’. At the
same time, a lack of sentimentality about origins does not negate a future desire
for home and family (whether these are ultimately reproduced or re-imagined in
relation to personal and national histories). What is certain is that the play of
personal photographs, their orderings and re-combinations, their circulation and
exhibition, their viewing and handling, is a critical site to trace these processes.
Up to this point I have treated the photograph as an exteriority (of accumulation

and exchange), focusing on place in terms of materiality and relatedness. Now I
want to turn to the internal landscapes and settings depicted in the photographs
themselves to consider place in relation to national culture and geographies of
modernity.
A place in the world: being modern after (and during) communism
A particularly incisive strand of anthropological research on postcolonial

photographic practice (Pinney 1997; Poole 1997; Strassler 2010) has brought
into focus the importance of backdrops in locating the photographed subject in
relation to power and capital. Due to the focus on the subaltern, this research
has demonstrated a particular sensitivity to the tension between the subjectifying
and objectifying functions of photography: namely, the ways subjects are placed
by others or place themselves before the lens in particular defining contexts.
In these studies, there is a tendency to trace a historical trajectory from the
colonial period, in which the bodies of the colonised were ‘framed’ and ‘captured’
by the coercive gaze of colonial power and inscribed as ethnological and regional
‘types’ by discourses of ethnographic realism, to a postcolonial situation in which
the formerly colonised voluntarily use photographic technology to project
themselves into the visual narrative of the new nation and, by extension, into
global modernity.
An important contribution of this research is its problematisation of
photographic realism: rather than fixing the subject in time and place, photographic
backdrops – properly-appointed bourgeois living rooms, monumental buildings,
dramatic physical landscapes, airplane cockpits – can tell us about where the subject
might like to be (or ‘play’ at being). Given that these backdrops frequently express
a desire for class advancement, material enrichment and technological progress,
the personal photograph, as Arjun Appadurai (1997) has noted, often serves an
important role in placing the subject not so much in a physical geography, as in the
‘discourse of modernity as a visual fact’.
Turning to the photographs from our corpus with these thoughts in mind,
there are at least two ways to think about subjects’ placing. First, one can look at
these photographs specifically as photographs of ‘migrants’ – the quintessential
subjects of both the repressive and the honorific functions of photography famously
described by Allan Sekula (1986). Migrants’ mobility, their anomalous appearance
in someone else’s territory, their economic vulnerability and their relative degrees
of visible racial or cultural ‘difference’ have typically rendered them ‘problematic’, if
exotic, bodies and, thus, predictable targets for surveillance and visual objectification
by the police, social welfare agents, journalists and ethnographers. At the same time,
migrants themselves use photography to document their upward class movement,
as well as their successful cultural assimilation. They actively offer themselves up to
the camera, seeking out the social alchemy of the photographic portrait.
I will not be able to elaborate further here on how this dual dynamic was
at work in the photographs we were shown, except to make a few brief points.
The photographs in the corpus were personal, not public photos, so needless
to say the ‘honorific’ dimension dominated over the ‘repressive’ one, except in a
few rare photographs taken by employers that seemed to put migrants ‘in their
place’ (that is, at work). In their own photographs, scenes of labour are rarely
depicted. There is little to identify these photographs as ‘migrant photos’, with
the exception of those taken at cultural association events. Cognizant of the

way that photographic practices sugarcoat the past, one woman from Bulgaria
who initially showed us her photographs decided not to let us scan or display
them because she said that they made it look as though she had enjoyed her
time in Greece.
The second aspect of placing that is pertinent to this corpus of photographs
and will be the focus of the rest of this chapter involves their role in placing
the subject vis-à-vis global capitalist modernity during both the communist
period and the so-called ‘transition’ to post-communism. While, as is recorded
in many of the photographs, this process of self-interpellation into capitalist
modernity clearly predated migration, given our focus on historical culture,
we were particularly interested in how that past was re-viewed from the
perspective of life in Greece after communism, as well as how that past affected
migrants’ views of Greek modernity. Teuta, with her photos spread before her
at the start of the interview, remarked: ‘Whatever photos are without colour
are from the old days’. In this ‘black-and-white’ Albania, lovers’ practice of
exchanging photographs with amorous messages written on the back, as late
as the 1980s, might appear as a testament to the ‘out-of-sync’ youth culture of
communist Albania. Yet, interventions on the backdrop – notably the hand-
colouring of photographs – revealed a keen sense of this belated modernity and
a desire for cultural acceleration. In hand-coloured photographs of Burbuqe
in her bikini from 1972 and of Florin with his classmates in 1990, which he
coloured himself, what is conveyed is a sense not only that the photographed
subjects feel modern in a backward country and want to see themselves as
modern in the photographs produced, but also that in the very performance of
these photographic acts they are introducing modernity to the particular social
context.
For instance, objects emblematic of consumer society and contemporary
technology often appear as props in migrants’ photographs from Albania: as
metonyms for technological progress, capitalist exchange and new consumer
tastes, but also as evidence of a cosmopolitanism and knowledge of the world
beyond the tightly-guarded borders of the Albanian state. In Florin’s hand-
coloured photograph from his student days, he and his classmates hold out
Albanian banknotes (lek). In another picture, a long-haired Florin and his
girlfriend pose with a bottle of a local ‘Cola’. For her part, Burbuqe, who at the
time got around on a bicycle, liked to pose with various motorised vehicles. We
should not forget that photographs themselves were commodities and a small
luxury under communism: Burbuqe told us she spent all her allowance from the
orphanage on photographs that she had taken during short periods of free time
outside the institution.
Unsurprisingly, the move to Greece and to an apparently more ‘advanced’
capitalist economy is initially documented in these photographs through a
visual discourse on objects. New clothes are a recurring theme: in the first days
after his arrival, Aris is pictured posing in the heavy metal T-shirt he bought
at a summer fair, while Teuta noted that in a photograph taken in the Volos
port she is wearing a new dress bought in Greece, but that her watch is from
Albania. As opposed to seeing the imaginative dimension of photography as a
‘resistance to the real,’ as Appadurai (1997) has argued, it might be more useful
to consider the complementarity of documentary realism and fantasy. The reality
effect of the photograph makes the pose credible and the change of ‘skin’ real.
The documentary function of the photograph, though, also seemed to be
used retrospectively to expose the staged backdrop as a ruse and relic of the
communist past. While Aris had a picture from his first days in Greece showing
him reaching up to take an object from a well-stocked supermarket shelf, he
also had a picture of himself walking home, carrying bulging supermarket bags,
proof that he actually could – and did – purchase goods there (Fig. 16.3).
While Burbuqe once posed with a motorbike, Vaso and her family now have
one, not to mention a car – and photos to prove it. Photographs could even
serve as a return on investments – evidence that money did not disappear
into thin air. After sending a baby carriage to her daughter in Bulgaria with
a transport service, Yonka received photographs in the mail of her grandson
and of the New Year’s celebration she had missed. When researchers visited
Yonka’s home in Bulgaria, her son gave them a pack of photographs to give
to his mother in Greece depicting appliances purchased with money she had
sent. It would be misleading, though, to suggest that migration and the move
into a capitalist context led unproblematically to the fulfilment of what under
communism were once just fantasies of consumer acquisition.
Indeed, some migrants with whom we spoke openly expressed their
reservations about Greece’s modernity. Negatively impressed when he arrived
in Greece with images from American movies in his head, Aris’s first reaction
was: ‘They’re kidding us’ (plaka mas kanoun). Aris had explained to us that he
would have begun university the same year he emigrated if he had not been
pushed by others to emigrate. He added that no one in his circle was even talking
about going to Greece, but only to countries such as Germany. Referring to the
heavy metal T-shirt from the fair, he made it clear that he already knew about
trends in heavy metal music when he was living in Albania and continued to
follow them in Greece, thus identifying himself with global music culture.
Florin, in an earlier interview, told us about summer conversations back in
Albania with relatives who had migrated to other countries. While he was clear
about where Greece stood relatively speaking in the global order of things, he
claimed to prefer its less intensive form of capitalism.
Figure 16.3 Aris Losis’s visit to the supermarket during the first days of his
migration to Greece, Volos, 1997
‘Greece’ on the backdrop
While the activist, the journalist or the anthropologist might seek to document, visually
or otherwise, the exploitation and violent treatment of migrants, those who have
undergone the experience of migration usually do not picture their experience using
the visual tropes of ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ documentary photography, but rather those
of picturesque travel and tourist image-making: the ultimate badge of the upwardly
mobile subject. In the early days of Albanian migration to Greece in the 1990s, Greeks
used to refer jokingly to the Albanian migrant as an ‘Albanian tourist’ (Alvanos touristas).
Figure 16.4 Burbuqe Durresi posing in bikini, Durrës, 1975 (left) and Vlorë,
1987 (right)
For those who had been relatively privileged subjects in communist Albania, though,
this term actually came close to describing how they saw themselves.
Many of the migrants who shared photographs with us viewed, or forced
themselves to view, migration right from the start through the lens of earlier
travel experiences and as a continuation, not a rupture, in the construction of
their personal album. Especially for those who had grown up in cities, studied at
university and whose families had ‘clean’ political records, there had been ample
opportunity to travel around the country in organised school or youth groups, as
well as to attend summer camps. Florin, who had many photographs with him
in Greece from trips he had taken in Albania with his college classmates from
Elbasan, regretted that he did not have any pictures from his very first days in
Greece, when he had worked picking peaches in the northern city of Veria. In the
album he sent back to his family, Florin, who crossed the Greek-Albania border
on foot, re-presents migration as an adventurous journey with ample opportunities
for male bonding and the performance of rugged masculinity. Burbuqe clearly
brought along with her to Greece the panorama landscape aesthetic cultivated
during her travels through communist Albania: the bikini beach pose found in her
Figure 16.5 Vaso Skentra with her children in front of the Hilton in Athens,
2004
photographs from summer camps in Albania (Fig. 16.4) recurs in images taken
during beach breaks from her job as a maid in a Greek hotel.
This recasting of migration experience as tourism meant recasting foreignness
as asset, not stigma, thus countering the cultural hierarchies of Greek public
discourse of the 1990s and 2000s that placed Albanians and Bulgarians low down
on the ladder of nationalities. Vaso, for instance, showed us a picture of herself with
her children in front of the Hilton hotel from a trip taken to Athens to arrange the
family’s identification papers (Fig. 16.5). Indicative of this reframing of migration
in terms of tourism and, by extension, as participation in – not exclusion from – a
cosmopolitan consumer culture, she noted: ‘Everyone there (at the Hilton) was
speaking a foreign language and so were we’.
Over time, the photo albums of the people with whom we spoke have been
filled with photographs from actual vacations: pictures from beach holidays
and excursions throughout Greece. Many also spoke about feeling like tourists
on return trips to Albania. Aris posed in a photo with his family in front of a
historical monument in Avlona as if he were a first-time visitor to the city. The
transformation of Albania into a landscape of memory and nostalgia, as well as of
pristine nature, cultural authenticity and the national historical past could be seen
in Florin’s photographs of Albania, especially one in which he is pictured in the
river where he used to play as a boy. That in this photograph he is in the company
of (today’s) village boys illustrates the extent to which Albania has become for him
a topos of the past. Indeed, one of the only pictures that visibly upset him was a
photo of a new house that he said he does not know why he started building in
Albania.
Figure 16.6 Greek Orthodox Easter celebration at Florin Gjokaj’s home,

Dimini, 1994
As migrants turned into Greek tourists, needless to say, the image of Greekness
that was semiotically constructed in the backdrop of personal photographs became
more complex. As a premier twentieth-century global summer tourist destination,
Greece was initially integrated into migrants’ personal photographs through well-
established codes of Western postcard representations of Greece. Aris, for instance,
admitted that most of the photographs he sent to his friends and family in Albania
were taken by the sea. Volos does not have any notable antiquities (the other
dominant visual sign of Greece), so the city’s port also was a popular backdrop
in others’ photos, particularly early ones. However, as the Albanian migrants with
whom we spoke gradually turned from travellers into residents of Greece, the
backdrops of their photos took on more national connotations, which in the Greek
context has prominent religious (Orthodox Christian) dimensions. Looking across
their photographs, this lived ‘Greece’ had certain recurring visual motifs: Easter
celebration, Orthodox baptism, sports teams and, above all, the Greek flag.
Photographic backgrounds, thus, served as a central device for working out
national and cultural identifications and expressing a sense of belonging (or the
longing to belong). While Vaso, for instance, showed us a photograph in which
she serves her family the traditional Albanian New Year’s meal, many photographs
that we were shown depicted rituals of the Greek Orthodox calendar. There were,
for instance, abundant pictures of Easter celebrations depicting the migrants
themselves (regardless of their faith) eagerly turning the lamb on the spit and
feasting with friends (Fig. 16.6). However, given the salience of religion as a marker
of Greekness, but also as a practical mode of integration into local social networks,
several of the Albanian migrants with whom we spoke, whose families in Albania
were not of Orthodox background (i.e. Muslim or Catholic) or who had not been
baptised due to the official atheism of the communist state, eventually decided to
be baptised or to baptise their children Greek Orthodox. Photographs from these
ceremonies were prominent in personal photo collections. This use of photographs
as a document of cultural passing also was evident in photographs taken of children
dressed in Greek national costume and holding Greek flags at school celebrations
(Fig. 16.7). Vaso showed us a picture of her son’s birthday party featuring a cake
decorated with the insignia of the AEK football club and an AEK wall banner.
Images with flag backdrops, though, often turned out to be more ambiguous
than one might have expected and a site in which theoretically conflicting
national and cultural identities actually could be reconciled. Juxtaposed Greek
and Albanian flags, a standard backdrop at events of the local Albanian cultural
association, simultaneously honour and undermine the exclusivist logic of national
identification. Yet, even apparently mono-national backdrops could be interpreted
in intercultural terms: Aris told us that the two-headed eagle he chose for his
soccer team’s uniforms did not just index the Albanian flag, but the Greek football
team AEK as well.
Photographs also were used to appropriate spaces indifferent or hostile to
migrants’ presence and, in this way, forcefully to claim place. They did not interpellate
their subjects into public discourse in Althusserian (1971) terms: this was not a
Figure 16.7 Teuta Sadiku’s son at a March 25th Greek Independence Day
celebration at his school, Volos, n.d.
‘hailing’ out of invisibility and into subjecthood as a migrant by a police officer’s

abrupt ‘Hey, you there’, but a self-recognition and claim to belonging in Greece –
something that proved intimately related to having belongings, especially property.
As we looked through her photos, Burbuqe exclaimed: ‘Me, me everywhere.’ In
contrast to the disdain she expressed for her own small home in Saranda, which
she described as the city’s eyesore, she proudly showed us pictures of herself
(often posing with guests) at a Greek hotel where she had worked, commenting
repeatedly: ‘Hotel mine’ (xenodoheio diko mou). The Bulgarian woman who did not
allow us to scan her photographs had a whole series in which she had posed herself
in different rooms of her employer’s house, while Yonka showed us a picture of
herself and her Bulgarian friends having a private celebration in the home of the
employer of one of her friends.
Photographs, of course, also frequently serve as backdrops themselves. In one
of Teuta’s photographs from her wedding day, a portrait of Enver Hoxha can be
discerned on the wall. Teuta explained that her father, a staunch Party loyalist, also
had hung up portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Engels and, briefly, Mao. He even replaced
a photograph of his mother that once hung on the wall with one of Ramiz Alia,
Hoxha’s successor. With the fall of communism, Teuta and her sister used the
opportunity of a paint job to remove the portraits of these political patriarchs:
her father, though, complained afterwards that they had forgotten to decorate the
house (giati den stolisate to spiti). Today, the only photograph hanging on the wall of
Teuta’s family house is that of her now deceased father: a large colour photograph
of him she had made in Greece from a small black-and-white print.
Of course, the ‘transition’ from communism should not be understood as a

liberation from political iconography, leading to a return to a private world of
images. As I have suggested, public discourses of visuality, whether those related
to the patriarchal, heteronormative family or national-religious culture, certainly
continued to inform the backdrops of photographs, as well as the use of photographs
as backdrops. When we noticed religious icons on the wall in a photograph of her
son in his crib in Greece, Teuta remarked that the icons were a present from her
son’s godmother. Discreetly, without openly identifying (and rejecting) this gift
as a form of cultural imposition, Teuta went on to note that she herself preferred
more childish decorations and had replaced the icons some years later, only to have
her children complain that she had not decorated the house as it had been before.
Epilogue
Photographic practices do not so much document migrant experience as mediate

that experience through the double process of projection and recognition through
which subjectivities and collectivities emerge and morph (Mazzarella 2004). The
pose before the camera, the circulation of photographs, the making of an album,
the telling of a story around a photograph – these performative acts do not simply
record experience, but are experience. As artifacts produced, gathered, dispersed,
copied, lost and destroyed in the process of moving between places and cultures,
photographs are integral, not incidental, to an ongoing process of (re)location and
self-composition during migration. Despite the use of analogue technology, the
epistolary quality of migrants’ photographic practices, the virtualisation of ‘home’
they enact and the imperative to ‘update’ they reveal prefigure digital photosharing
and profile culture. That this would be the case is not surprising given that in
late modernity elements of the migration experience have become generalised as
people undergo frequent changes in jobs, spouses, religion, culture and politics
without necessarily moving to another country. That this kind of home-making
was dynamic and flexible, challenging both the idea that mobility is antithetical to
‘rooting’ and the identification of ‘home’ with a singular, physical location (house)
and with a cultural past tense (homeland), does not mean that these practices
were progressive in a political sense: photography’s ‘magic’ could bridge the
contradictions and gaps in narratives, rather than expose them as a way to begin an
explicit rethinking of ideological presuppositions (relatedness, gender roles, ethnic
reproduction) associated with the idea of home.
The photographic backdrop of migrants’ personal photographs also turned
out to be a complex site in which multiple identifications and kinds of belonging
were worked out. As a form of self-interpellation, placing oneself in different
settings could be an affectively charged mode of seeing oneself as ‘part of the
picture’ – whether of global modernity and consumer culture, or of Greek society
as a national-cultural context. At the same time, these images could reveal that
integration as nothing but a wilful projection, haunted by the objectifying gaze of
those attempting to put migrants ‘in their place’ in the global labour market and in
Greek society. Given the imaginative dimension of the backdrop, though, it could
also be used strategically and ironically as a device of cultural passing that enabled
the migrant subject to get by and avoid or resist actual affiliation. While visiting
Greece as a tourist destination is an incontrovertible testament to achieving the
status of the modern consumer, residing in Greece could have the opposite effect.
Contrary to hegemonic Greek narratives of cultural superiority vis-à-vis migrants,
as well as the assumed teleology of migration as a process of enlightenment

through acculturation, migrants as cosmopolitan citizens of photography might
imagine themselves as bringing modernity with them and perhaps at some point
moving on.
References
Ahmed, S. et al. (2003), ‘Introduction’, in S. Ahmed et al. (eds), Uprootings/

Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Oxford and New York: Berg,
1–19.
Althusser, L. (1971), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward
an Investigation’, in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, London and New
York: New Left Books, 127–86.
Appadurai, A. (1997), ‘The Colonial Backdrop’, Afterimage 24(5): 4–7.
Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by R.
Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Batchen, G. (2004), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, New York:
Princeton Architectural Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1990), Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Clifford, J. (1994), ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 302–38.
Doane, M.A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New
York: Routledge.
Edwards, E. and J. Hart (eds) (2004), Photographs Objects Histories: On the
Materiality of Images, New York and London: Routledge.
Fortier, A.-M. (2000), Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity, New York:
Berg.
Hirsch, M. (1997), Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hirsch, M. (ed.) (1999), The Familial Gaze, Dartmouth, NH: Dartmouth University
Press.
Jones, A. (ed.) (2003), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, New York:
Routledge.
Kuhn, A. (1995), Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, London: Verso.
Kunreuther, L. (2006), ‘Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the
Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu’, Cultural Anthropology 21(3): 323–53.
Mazzarella, W. (2004), ‘Culture, Globalisation, Mediation’, Annual Review of

Anthropology 33: 345–67.
Metz, C. (1985), ‘Photography and Fetish’, October 34: 81–90.
Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16(3): 6–18.
Nacify, H. (2001), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Palmer, D. (2010), ‘Emotional Archives: Online Photo Sharing and the Cultivation
of the Self ’, Photographies 3(2): 155–71.

Papailias, P. (2005), Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pinney, C. (1997), Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, London:
Reaktion.
Poole, D. (1997), Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image
World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Probyn, E. (1996), Outside Belongings, New York: Routledge.
Sekula, A. (1986), ‘The Body and the Archive’, October 39: 3–64.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography, New York: Penguin.
Strassler, K. (2010), Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity
in Java, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wolbert, B. (2001), ‘The Visual Production of Locality: Turkish Family Pictures,
Migration and the Creation of Virtual Neighborhoods’, Visual Anthropology
Review 17(1): 21–35.
359
Afterword

Photography and Greece –
A Historian’s Perspective
Ludmilla Jordanova
Photography offers scholars a very particular lens through which to view the
world. As the volume shows, by focusing on a single place, Greece, and a specific
medium, photography, it is possible to reveal cultural, historical, literary, political
and imaginative issues in all their richness. Photography belongs to no single
discipline, but touches on every one, including the sciences, where it is a major
tool of research. In this short afterword, I briefly explore photography from
my perspective as a historian with strongly interdisciplinary interests, picking
up themes that are present in the preceding chapters and noting some of the
complexities of the medium and hence some of the issues it raises.
The appeal and importance of photography have little to do with its analytical
possibilities, however. As a number of the contributors point out, its capacity to
trigger and shape emotions and memories has taken on huge significance ever since
its inception. This is partly for the somewhat prosaic reasons that the technique
spread extremely fast and that, once democratised by the availability of cheap, small
cameras, it became woven into the fabric of everyday life and was thereby capable of
mediating intimate relationships and memorable occasions for participants, family
and friends, descendents and associates. At the same time, photographic books
and exhibitions, postcards and magazines, cartes de visite and advertisements came,
over the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to infiltrate public and private
life, and to constitute experience. This trend continues in our digital age, with the
web awash with photographs without which hardly any activity or experience is
deemed complete. The myriad feelings photographs prompt certainly vary from
time to time and place to place. It could hardly be otherwise given the technological
changes in photography over close to two centuries and the physical differences
between, for example, holding and beholding an object of which the owner may
only have one precious copy and viewing a photograph on a range of devices that
alter the size, and sometimes the properties of digital images, which are almost
infinitely malleable. Published photographs exhibit comparable diversity.
361
Photography is bound up with a range of major changes, such as consumerism

and the advent of mass tourism after WWII. From its earliest days, photography
was associated with travel. But there are many forms of travel, including from
the armchair, using photographs. The relationships between tourism and travel
are intricate, with those in the related businesses, including what we now call the
heritage industry, exploiting photography in advertising and propaganda, in order to
construct potent images of peoples and places. And since a photograph is in principle
capable of being reproduced indefinitely, spin off products, such as postcards, can
saturate people’s senses.
This insinuating ubiquity makes photography challenging to write about, and
perhaps accounts for the tendency to treat defined elements of it in isolation from
each other, a trend that is particularly evident in writings about ‘art’ photography,
documentary photography and early photography. But in reality the many types of
photography fade into one another and are in conversation with each other, so that
thinking about as many of its forms as possible together is certainly productive,
especially for historians. We can extend the point and observe how photography is
in deep conversation with other media, such as painting and prints, for instance, as
well as film, sculpture and architecture.
All these comments are general ones and give little indication of why photography
in – and of – Greece raises distinctive questions. Arguably it does, and again, as
several chapters show, this is partly because the era of photography has also been
the era of Greek nation building and of Greek ‘modernisation’. We might say that
the quintessentially modern form of visual representation – photography – has
peculiar resonance for a country in which the relationships between ancient life and
modernity are at once so palpable and so vexed. A number of factors contribute
to Camera Graeca being such a significant subject: Greece’s status, on some
accounts at least, as the cradle of modern culture, democracy, science and medicine;
its popularity as a tourist destination over many decades; the continuing interest in
its myths and literature in mass as in high culture; its ‘romantic’ history; the allure of
key archaeological sites, some of which are immediately recognised across the world,
thanks to photography.
There are two further factors to consider. The first is aesthetic and can be
traced through the long and complex history of various forms of classicism. The
column is emblematic of this point. It enabled a book of photographs by Kyriakos
Delopoulos (1989) to open with a black and white image of columns, sea and
distant hills, entitled simply ‘Ancient columns, fallen gods’. Only at the very end of
the book, in small print, do we learn that this is Sounion. It is as if ruined columns
stand for ‘Greece’ – a notion as much as a place – where the long-recognised
poignancy of ruins is doing a great deal of cultural work in combining ancient
grandeur with the ravages of time. Photographs of familiar, iconic scenes can act to
tag a country, a city, a region. The processes through which this occurs are elaborate
and multifaceted, drawing upon responses that are about mnemonics as well as
aesthetics. Furthermore, the columns of classical Greece possess a special status
within schemes of architectural design that have been incalculably influential.
Eyes have been trained, after all, over many centuries to appreciate classical
proportions and motifs.
The second factor relates to recurring human types seen in photographs of
Greek people: the Orthodox priest, the shepherd, the fishermen, people in
traditional costumes, men in white skirts. I am not suggesting that these types are
unproblematic, only that, seen in the right context, like whitewashed walls and
intense blue sky, they can evoke ‘Greece’, and that they could not do so without
photography. Photographers have exploited familiar tropes in relation to bodies,

costumes and faces in their representations of ‘Greece’.
There are two intertwined phenomena here, and they are indicative of the most
challenging aspects of photography for scholars. On the one hand, there are images
that could indeed have been taken nowhere other than in Greece, and, of course, the
Acropolis must stand as the classic instance here, since it is probably one of the most
photographed sites in the world. Here the value of the photograph lies in its lack
of ambiguity. A photographer was there, and it looks like no other place on Earth.
In this sense photography can generate a witness statement, a record, a testimony
not only to a place but to a person, even if unnamed, and to their presence there,
even if the exact moment of the encounter cannot be specified. Scholars recognise
these claims to fidelity even as they strive to be sceptical about them. At the same
time, other photographs invite viewers to take a good deal on trust. Here we might
refer to Arnold Wycombe Gomme’s little book titled Greece, first published in 1945.
Gomme (1886–1959), a scholar and editor of ancient Greek writings, received help
from the Greek Ministry of Education in compiling the volume. Facing page 118,
we find two photographs of ‘Greek Types’: an Orthodox priest riding through an
olive grove and a young male ‘peasant worker’, wearing a large straw hat. We simply
have to trust that, especially in the latter case, there is something ‘Greek’ about the
image. The photographs are so decontextualised, so out of time, that readers have no
choice but to rely on the authority of the publication for their documentary status.
In fact, there is a long history to a concern with types, which draws some of its
energy from physiognomy, a subject of interest to the ancients. Photography made
a substantial contribution to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates
among scientists, medical practitioners and social analysts about the nature and
existence of human types and facial characteristics – Francis Galton’s composite
images are a case in point. Furthermore, the photographs in Gomme’s book are
illustrations, that is to say, they purportedly serve to extend, if in some unspecified way,
points made in the text. They refer back to words, thereby depending on them. In this
respect Greece differs markedly from works where the texts and images are creatively
and self-consciously interwoven. Photographs are often used in a casual way by
historians, who take for granted their capacity to ‘illustrate’ phenomena faithfully.
This casualness has two components, I suggest. First, it is possible to be casual by
taking the technology of photography for granted, by failing to see photographers
(and their equipment) as possessing agency. Photographers make choices that shape
viewers’ experiences. It then becomes ‘natural’ to see through the photograph and give
priority to the scene it purports to represent. Thus it is easy to be casual when what
are in fact complex mediating processes and devices are rendered invisible. Second,
the superfluity and proliferation of photographs allow them to be treated carelessly.
To make matters worse, they frequently become detached from their contexts of
production and use, making it hard if not impossible to attribute authorship and
determine subject matter and dates, and hence to feel secure about their status as
evidence. Modern historians may be tempted to devalue abundant sources, and this
accounts for a striking feature of those who work on earlier periods, and employ
huge effort on making every scrap of evidence, no matter what its form, work for its
living. In the case of the peasant in Gomme’s Greece, Paul Popper, a Czech émigré
photojournalist who died in 1969, is acknowledged as the source. Popper has not
loomed large in standard accounts of the history of photography, and Gomme
neither engages with nor interprets the photographs in the book. ‘Art’ photography
is treated quite differently, with limited numbers of ‘great’ photographers accorded
the sort of attention given to painters. In such cases, there is generally considerably
more ancillary information available, making the scholar’s job easier.
A comparison between Gomme’s Greece and Constantine Manos’s A Greek
Portfolio (1972) is instructive. The latter is a collection of over a hundred high
quality black and white photographs. Each one has its own page and is presented
without a caption. A list of short titles may be found at the end of the book. They
consist of a few words describing the scene, followed by the place where the picture
was taken. For example, ‘Gathering olives. Peloponnesus’ does little to tether the
image of a single stooping woman on page 60. Arguably it does not need to. This
is because there is a poetics of photography. It could hardly be otherwise given the
capacity of photographs to evoke memories, to offer a certain kind of intimacy
with those not present and with scenes never witnessed at first hand by viewers.
They invite reverie. Inevitably some do this more than others. Large photographs,
devoid of distracting text, permit, as so many commentators on photography have
observed, indeed positively encourage viewers to muse, to make up stories, and
experience a kind of vicarious immersion in the world they depict. Hence, we may
assume, the attraction of books of old photographs. And those viewers come with
heavy baggage when it comes to a subject such as ‘Greece’. While Gomme’s book
is more explicitly geared towards instructing readers, like Manos’s, it invites them
to experience a sense of tradition through photographs.
Nonetheless, it is vital to emphasise the diversity of photographic practices that
‘Greece’ has elicited, far beyond those considered to be illustration or ‘art’. Consider,
for example, the stunning aerial photographs of ancient Greek archaeological
sites taken by Georg Gerster. His images are beautiful in their own right; they
show the sites from a vantage point available to very few people. Furthermore,
the photographs were taken at times of day when the sites were mostly empty
of people. In this way, it is possible to imagine when viewing them that we have
a special privilege. The short introduction, by the distinguished historian Paul
Cartledge, is entitled ‘The Treasures of Ancient Greece’. ‘Treasures’ carries rather
particular connotations. While it is obvious enough that it carries a positive charge,
conjuring up what is rare, valuable and exceptional, it also suggests a selection
from a larger array for wide consumption. More than this, it implies a connection
to high culture, to civilisation. This work is, I suspect, primarily intended to be a
coffee table book. For me this is not a pejorative category; it simply describes a
certain way of using and displaying photographs, to give pleasure, and to provide
some instruction. But something else strikes me about this work. Amongst all
disciplines, archaeology is one of those that uses photography most extensively,
as integral to its practices. An aerial photograph does not replace a plan, but both
give an overview of a site. In developing maps, aerial photography has played a

central role. So, while we respond to both the breathtaking beauty and panoramic
vision Gerster’s images afford, it is also possible to imagine that a uniquely accurate
and informative vista has been provided. Special kinds of skill are required to
produce such images, quite different from those needed for, say, black and white
documentary photography, contemporary photojournalism or advertising.
The Sites of Ancient Greece contains an illustrated timeline as well as a glossary,
and lists of historical figures and of mythical and divine figures. Overall, however,
it is a picture book of places drenched in light, with only occasional tiny figures
to be seen. It reveals the close juxtaposition of ancient and modern Greece, and
invites those who open it to imagine the glories of the former by inspecting
the remnants that remain. Captions are short and discreetly placed. Another
magnificent recent photographic book about Greece, by Anne and Henri Stierlin
(2009), is more overtly didactic. It contains much more text: the photographs, in
which people do not appear, are accompanied by plans and diagrams. In one sense,
this work is a more complex affair, since readers are expected to collate different
types of input, and the photographs do not stand alone, but are accompanied by
captions. A chronological table and glossary precede the bibliography; hence,
the didactic intent is evident. It might be tempting to consider such volumes as
mere commercial products, but this hardly lessens their interest. They help us to
appreciate the precise ways in which photography is everywhere and in which
‘Greece’ is invoked, represented and marketed. It is striking that, in a world that is
saturated with photographs and where they can be transmitted in seconds, there is
still an audience for books about Greece. The publication of illustrated guides, for
example, shows no sign of abating.
Camera Graeca invites readers to keep a number of themes in mind: the nature
of photography itself; the distinctive position of photography in relation to an area,
a nation and an idea – ‘Greece’; and the range of approaches commentators have
taken, from ethnography to poetry. In the process, contributors acknowledge and
draw upon some of the best-known writings about photography, such as Roland
Barthes’s Camera Lucida; they also engage with well established themes, such as
the relationships between tradition and modernity, national identity, the status of
photography as an art form, the representation of war, and the ideological complexities
of photography. More specifically, they ask what makes the Greek case special. Each
geographical area has its own story to tell, which derives from a vast range of factors
ranging from technology and expertise to skills, markets and aesthetic traditions.
Beyond that, however, ‘Greece’ stands for so much that its photography bears an
especially heavy burden. Naturally it is important to distinguish between the work

of visitors and natives, between photographers of different periods, backgrounds,
ages and so on. But the density of ideas about Greece’s past, its cultural legacy,
troubled history and persistent traditions, and how all this shapes and re-shapes the
visual world of each era is striking. Visual manifestations of myths and stereotypes
certainly play their part here – photography has been a major agent in their
propagation and transformation. By virtue of this medium, images of ‘Greece’ get
inside people, most of whom already possess a fund of ideas from a wide range of
media, further shaping and extending that fund. Arguably there is no other country
for which these phenomena are quite so dense and important, where the amalgam
of assumptions about Western history is so intense, and so blended with, on the one
hand, athleticism and idealised bodies, and on the other, the beauty and pleasure
possible through travel and, more recently, mass tourism.
Many of these key elements existed before photography but photography
transformed them most profoundly. On this account, it is possible to appreciate
what might at first sight appear paradoxical. Many disciplines have been shaped
by, comment on, and use photography. At the same time, a historical perspective
has something particularly valuable to offer. This is partly because it can address
the full range of photographic practices together, without feeling the need for
aesthetic hierarchies. It can also take a detached view of the literary traditions
photography has spawned, while developing a lively sense of the longue durée.
The story of Greece and photography, in fact, begins with the earliest attempts to
produce multiple images of iconic places and people; it begins, in other words, with
copying statues and then develops with print culture. Photography is best seen in
this generous context. A historical approach encourages us to think about politics,
economics, society and culture all at once. Where and how, for example, is money
made out of George Meis’s photographic work, which takes many forms, including
books and posters, postcards and calendars, which help promote tourism? I have
been hinting at a broad, integrative approach to photography that works especially
effectively in the case of Greece. It embraces the ordinariness of photographs, their
ubiquity, their lives as commodities, relics and mementos, their capacity to heal and
unsettle, to exercise power, promote ideologies, display identity, assist research and
to act as gifts and as evidence. Few zones and few ideas are more fertile terrain for
such wide-ranging exploration than ‘Greece’.
References
Delopoulos, K. (1989), Ex Graecia: A Photographic Itinerary, Athens: Adyton.

Gerster, G. (2012), The Sites of Ancient Greece, London: Phaidon.
Gomme, A.W. (1945), Greece, London: Oxford University Press.
Manos, C. (1972), A Greek Portfolio, London: Secker and Warburg.
Stierlin, A. and H. Stierlin (2009), Greece from Mycenae to the Parthenon, Hong
Kong: Taschen.
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to footnotes.
3-D technology 159, 166–7 Antiquity and Photography 4–5, 8, 30, 100,
104, 107, 108, 109, 201, 250n31,
Acropolis Museum 140, 144, 148, 150, 151 327
Acropolis of Athens 28, 78–80, 81–3, 82, Antoniadis, Kostis 66
96, 98, 99–100, 110, 135–7, 149, Used Photographs (1986) 66
150, 363 aperture 176, 177, 180
Bonhomme 141, 142–3, 194 Arago, François 117n5, 133
Freud 14, 108–9, 137 Arcadia 55, 57
Girault de Prangey 100, 101, 104–5 archaeological photography 4–5, 28, 77,
Lotbinière 3, 79–80, 96, 134 80–83, 96, 116–17, 119, 134–40,
Muslim tombstones 145, 145 153
The Other Acropolis project 140, 143–50, Asia Minor (1919–22) 15, 36, 37–8,
145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153 213–16, 220, 221–9, 222, 223, 224,
Sébah 100, 115, 124, 124, 125 229
Stillman 13–14, 100, 101–4, 105–6, Aspects of Greek Photography 6
107–8, 136 Athena Nike 82, 135, 144
see also Parthenon; Propylaea Athens 83, 84–6, 85, 86, 116, 122, 124–5
affect, the 310, 318 Derrida 141, 142, 194, 201–2
Agee, James 194 Sébah 84, 113, 114, 115, 124–5, 127
with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Athens War Museum (AWM) 262, 268,
Famous Men 194 271, 272
Agioutandi, Aglaia 325
Albanian migrants 15–16, 337, 338–40, Baedeker 114, 116
342, 342–4, 348–9, 350, 350–52, Badger, Gerry 195–6
351, 353, 354–6, 355 Balafas, Kostas 6, 25n1
Alkidis, Periklis 64 Epirus 50
‘allochronism’ 136, 197 resistance groups 48, 49, 50–51
Alma Tadema, Lawrence 14 Balkan Wars (1912–13) 34–5, 35, 257, 258,
Amalia, Queen 5n6, 28, 29, 29, 30, 248, 263–5, 270, 271, 271, 272
248n28 Battle of Sarandaporo 15, 36, 257,
American Mission for Aid in Greece 258–62, 259, 260, 263, 268, 269,
(AMAG) 58 269, 271–2, 273
American School of Classical Studies in Barthes, Roland 137, 139, 180, 187, 258,
Athens 53, 162 322, 339
Anafi, island of 15, 277–88, 278, 283, 287, Camera Lucida (1981) 9–10, 11, 109,
288, 289, 289–92 138, 152–3, 341
367
Batchen, Geoffrey 10, 133, 139, 343 Chroussaki, Maria 57

Baud-Bovy, Samuel 325 Chryssopoulos, Christos 197, 208
Beck, Henri 85 Flashlight between the Teeth (2012) 194,
Belias, Andreas 193, 198, 199 200, 205–6, 207, 207
Benaki Museum Photographic Archive 86, Church, Edwin Frederic 100
235, 245, 277, 289 collages, Nelly 235, 238, 239, 241, 242, 245,
Benjamin, Walter 9, 136, 139, 172, 266 246, 246, 252, 253
Bennett, Tony 138 collective memory 15, 295, 296, 306–7,

Bérard, Victor and Boissonnas, Frédéric 310–11
197–8 colonialism 136, 237, 330
Bergson, Henri 139, 171, 172, 173, 219n6 crypto-colonialism 136, 236–7
Matter and Memory 171, 172 Conze, Alexander 116
Bergstein, Mary 109 Corfu 88, 89
Bernal, Martin 107 Council of Europe 267
‘Hellenomania’ 107 countryside photography 57, 59, 59–60, 90
Bohrer, Frederick N. 13–14 Crary, Jonathan 137, 161, 166, 167
Boissonnas, Frédéric 5–6, 36–8, 104, 234n5 Techniques of the Observer (1990) 161
Crete 42, 42 Crete 15, 88, 314–15, 318
La Campagne d’Epire 37 Boissonnas 42, 42
La Campagne de Macédoine 37 Geraki 316–18, 317, 320, 321, 321–2,
Boissonnas, Henri-Paul 36–8 323, 325–6, 327, 332
Bonfils, Félix 4, 81, 136 Nelly 41–4, 43, 326–7, 327, 328, 329,
Bonhomme, Jean-François 201 331
Acropolis of Athens 141, 142–3, 194 Sfakia 15, 313, 314, 315–18, 319–23,
Borri, Bartolomeo 88, 89 324, 325, 328, 329–30, 331–2
Bourdieu, Pierre 57, 240, 346 Stillman 88, 104, 106
Bourdouri, Irini 5, 37, 38, 236, 250n29 Curtius, Ernst 116
Bresson, Henri-Cartier 64n12, 200, 267 ‘cyclical synergy’ 15, 326
Brunet, François 175, 196 Cyprus 179, 180
Bulgarian migrants 15–16, 337, 338–40,
344, 345, 345, 348, 349, 352, 355 Daguerre, L.J.M. 79n6, 96, 133, 134
Burgin, Victor 9, 62, 173, 174 daguerreotypes 4, 5, 8, 28, 55, 79, 80, 97,
Burke, Peter 12, 215 99, 133, 134, 195
Byzantine Empire 32, 83, 115, 121–2, 237 Damianos, Georgios 87
Debray, Régis 96, 107
Cadava, Eduardo 225 Deleuze, Gilles 171n3, 172, 174n7, 174–
Calligas, Lizzie 140–42, 141 5n8, 177, 183, 187, 187n18, 189
Metoikesis (2010) 140–42, 141 Deleuze and Guattari 177, 187
Caplan, P. 277, 278, 292 Delphic Festivals 234
Caryatids 82, 115, 142, 181 Delta, Penelope 234, 234n5
Cavafy, C.P. 176, 198, 198n11 Derrida, Jacques 138, 179
Chios, island of 88 Athens 141, 142, 194, 201–2
Chiotis, Theodoros 14 Des Granges, Paul (Baron) 88
Christians 145, 226, 227, 228 Desipris, Frangiskos 87
INDEX 369
diasporic photography, see migrant flâneur 200, 202

photography Flora-Karavia, Thaleia 264
documentary photography 44, 58, 60–61, Folklore Centre, Athens (Academy of
63, 64, 198 Athens) 279
Dourountous, Yiorgis (Katsoulogiorgis) Foucault, Michel 241
326, 327 Foundation for Social Providence (PIKPA)
Durand, Asher 67, 100 244
Durresi, Burbuqe (Albanian migrant) foustanella 29–30, 117, 119

343–4, 348, 349, 351, 351, 355 Fox Talbot, W.H. 8–9, 10, 80n10, 134, 152,
195
Economic Cooperation Administration Pencil of Nature, The (1844) 8–9, 10,
(ECA) 58 134, 152, 195
Edwards, E. 8n9, 11, 107n3, 139, 278, Frank, Robert 258, 270
278n3, 313n1, 314, 322, 323, 343 Frankish Tower (Acropolis) 82, 115, 122
Edwards, Gary 77, 80, 90 Frantz, Alison and Talcott, Lucy 53–4, 60
Efstathiadis, Petros 68, 69, 71 This is Greece (1941) 53–4, 60
Efstathopoulos, Stelios 64 Freud, Sigmund 14, 108–9, 137
Everyday Portraits (1989) 64 Friedrich, Caspar David 104
Eisler, Colin 103 Fyntanidis, Theologos F. 89
Elkins, James 95, 109
Eluard, Paul 196n7 Garibaldi 106
Elytis, Odysseas 5n7 Gaziades, Anastasios 89
Emerson, Waldo Ralph 100 Gaziades Brothers 38
Erechtheion 146, 146–7 George I, King 30, 32, 36, 37, 271
ethnography 310–11, 318, 338–40, 365 Geraki (Giorgis Karkanis), Sfakia, Crete
excavations 116, 245, 246 316–18, 317, 320, 321, 321–2, 323,
excursionism 57 325–6, 327, 332
Excursions Daguerriennes (1842) 79–80, 96, Gerster, Georg 364–5
97, 99 Sites of Ancient Greece, The (2012) 365
‘Exhibition of the War History of the Getty Museum 80
Greeks’ 261–2, 267–8, 270–71 Giannakopoulos, Georgios 15
exile photographs, Ikaria 15, 295–6, 299, Ginzburg, Carlo 331
299–300, 300, 301, 304–5, 305, Girault de Prangey, Joseph-Philibert 80, 83
306–11 Acropolis of Athens 100, 101, 104–5
exiles, Ikaria 15, 295, 296–8, 302–3 Parthenon 3–4, 97–9, 98
Gjokaj, Florin (Albanian migrant) 342,
Fabian, Johannes 136, 197 342–3, 344, 346, 348, 349, 351,
Facebook 17 352, 353
Fais, Michel 194, 197, 208 Gomme, Arnold W. 16, 363, 364
The City on her Knees (2002) 194, 200, Greece (1945) 16, 363, 364
202, 203, 204, 204 graffiti 101, 122, 202, 204
fascism 244, 250, 250n29, 250n30 Grand Tour 55, 78, 113
Fatseas, Panayotis 39–41, 40, 44 ‘Great Endeavour’ 32, 33, 36, 44, 121
flânerie 200–208 Greco-Turkish war (1897) 33–4, 272
Greco-Turkish war (1919–22) 15, 36, 37–8, Nelly 6, 15, 233, 241–2, 252
213–16, 220, 221–9, 222, 223, 224, Ifantidis, Fotis 14, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150,
229 151
Greece 3–7, 16, 26, 28, 32–4, 36, 54–6, 57, Ignatieff, Michael 169, 170
121–2, 236–7, 362–6 Ikaria, island of
national identity 28–32, 51, 56 exile photographs 15, 295–6, 299,
resistance groups 48, 48, 49, 49–51, 299–300, 300, 301, 304–5, 305,
148, 296–7 306–11

tourists 41, 54–6, 57, 68, 356–7 exiles 15, 295, 296–8, 302–3
traveller-photographers 78–80, 81, 83, immigrants 142, 153
84, 90, 113, 115–16 industrial photography 31, 60, 61, 89–90
Greece photography 5–7, 12, 25–6, 28, 54, Instagram 17
57–8, 62–3, 68–70, 87–8 installations, see photo-ethnographic
Greek Archaeological Service 116, 122n11 installations
Greek pavilion (World’s Fair, New York, institutionalisation (of photography) 54, 62
1939) 235, 238, 239, 241, 242, 246 Ioannidis, Kostas 7, 14
Greek photographers 3, 5, 62–7, 68–71, Contemporary Greek Photography: A
89–90 Century in Thirty Years (2008) 7
Greek Photographic Society (EFE) 266, Ioannou, Yorgos 199–200, 202
267 Omonoia 1980 193, 196–7, 198–9, 200,
Grossman, Heather E. 14 204, 206–7
group photography, see photographic Istanbul 14, 113, 114, 115, 221, 226, 230
portraiture
guidebooks, see traveller-photographers Jay, Paul 172
Jordanova, Ludmilla 16
habitus 60, 326 journals
Hagioi Theodoroi church 125–7, 126 Journal de Genève 37, 38
Hamdi, Osman 115, 127 Photography 6
Hamilakis, Yannis 14, 116–17, 122n11 The Crayon 100, 101
Harissiadis, Dimitris 6, 58, 60, 61, 61–2, Junta (1967–74) 15, 233, 247, 257, 260,
265, 267 261, 262n2, 263, 265, 270, 272, 273
Hege, Walter 104, 241, 250n31
Heidegger, Martin 138, 239, 316n5 Kalamos Mount (Anafi) 281
Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive Kalantzis, Konstantinos 15
(ELIA) 32, 79n4, 81n13, 88n17, Kambanellis, Iakovos 286n6
90n20, 214n2 Karakasidou, Anastasia 33
Hellenic Photographic Society 57–8, 61 Kefallinos, Yannis 47, 198
Hephaisteion 122, 123, 124, 124 Kenna, Margaret 15, 277–81, 283, 289
heterotopic/heterotopia 241, 150 Kitromilides, Paschalis 121–2, 125
‘Hill of the Muses’ 99 Knossos 104
Homolle, Theophile 116 Kodak 34, 46, 86, 263
Hope, Thomas 145n8 Kokkinias, Panos 70, 71, 71
kollyva 282, 283, 288
iconographic photography 62, 77–8, 236–7 Konstantinou, Dimitrios 83, 84
INDEX 371
Korai statues 140–42, 141 Megali Idea 32, 33, 36, 44, 121
Kossuth, Lagos 106 Melas, Pavlos 34
Kotzias, Kostas 247–8, 249 Meletzis, Spyros 49–50, 265
Kouki, Eleni 15 memories 13, 83, 139, 152–3, 339, 341, 364
Kracauer, Siegfried 9 memory 11, 169–70, 171–2, 295
Kythera, island of 6, 39 Merleau-Ponty 184n11
Messene, Greece 164, 165, 166
landscape photography 5–6, 30–31, 31, metapolitefsi 233, 250, 253

64–5, 69–70, 71, 83–4, 88 Metaxas, Ioannis 41, 235, 238–9, 248
Letsios, Dimitris 57 Metaxas regime (1936–41) 233, 240, 241,
literary photobooks, see photobooks 244, 252–3
Loizos, Peter 290, 313n1 Nelly 15, 246, 247, 248, 250
London Great Exhibition of Works of Metz, Christian 343
Industry 195 Michailidis, Dimitris 89–90
Lord Byron 83 migrant photography 15–16, 337, 338–41,
Lord Elgin 142 342, 342–6, 345, 347–9, 350,
Losis, Aris (Albanian migrant) 345, 349, 350–57, 351, 352, 355
350, 352, 354 military imagery 33–6, 35, 261–2
Lotbinière, Pierre-Gustave Joly de 4n2, 96 see also war photographs
Acropolis of Athens 3, 79–80, 96, 134 military museums 262–3, 267–8
Parthenon 96–7, 97, 99 AWM 262, 268, 271, 272
Lycabettus Hill 81, 84 Battle of Sarandaporo 15, 36, 257,
258–62, 259, 260, 263, 268, 269,
magazines 269, 271–2, 273
Elliniki Fotografia 57, 265, 266 Moholy-Nagy 196
Neolaia 235, 245, 250, 252 monumentalisation 5, 11, 14, 135, 136–7,
Malahias, Christos (Ikaria) 303–5 143, 153
exile photographs 15, 295–6, 304–5, Moraites, Petros 30, 81, 83
305, 306–11 Moralis, Yannis 193
photography shop 303, 304–11, 305 Moschovi, Alexandra 13, 200
Maligoura, Eleni 64 mosques, Turkish 80, 97, 98, 134, 148, 150
Omonoia Square (1987–96) 64 Mouzakitou, Eleni 14
Malin, Brenton J. 160–61, 162, 166 Murray, John 115, 116, 117
Mamoulaki, Elena 15 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New
Manos, Constantine 364 York 58, 267
Margaritis, Philippos 30, 80, 83 Muslim tombstones 145, 145
Marinatos, Spyros 246–7 Muslims 141–2, 145, 148, 153, 224, 227–8
Markou, Nikos 68–9, 71 Mycenaean 56, 144
Marshall Plan 58, 60
materiality 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 104, 107n3, 139, National Archaeological Museum 241
140, 144, 146, 150, 152, 153, 230, national identity 13, 25, 26, 28–32, 51, 54,
343, 347 56, 57, 67, 70, 71, 121, 236, 248,
Mauthausen (Austria) 286n6 365
Mazower, Mark 45, 46 naturalist movement 57
Nazis 148, 243–4, 245, 248, 250, 252–3 Papailias, Penelope 15–16
Nelly (Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari) 41, Papaioannou, Iraklis 3n1, 6, 57n6
57, 233, 234–6, 237–8, 240–43, Papaioannou, Voula 46, 58–60, 59
244–6, 247, 248–50, 252–3 ‘Black Album’ 47, 47, 198
collages 235, 238, 239, 241, 242, 245, Hellas 1941–1942, see ‘Black Album’
246, 246, 252, 253 La Grece à ciel ouvert 57–62
Crete 41–4, 43, 325 Papargyriou, Eleni 14, 171, 176–7
iconographic photography 6, 15, 233, Paparrigopoulos, Konstantinos 121–2, 124,

241–2, 251, 252 237
Sfakia 326–7, 327, 328, 329, 331 Papazoglou, Leonidas 34
Nencheva, Yonka Yankova (Bulgarian Parashos, Kostas 46
migrant) 345, 345, 349, 355 Paris Exhibition 195
New British Documentary 64 Paris Peace Conference (1919) 219n8, 220
newspapers Parr, Martin 195–6
Atlantis 247 Parthenon 81, 82, 96–9, 146
Ethnikos Kyrix 247 Girault de Prangey 3–4, 97–9, 98
Kathimerini 249, 250, 252 Lotbinière 96–7, 97, 99
Makedonia 245, 261, 263 Pratt 99–100
Manchester Guardian 221, 222, 225 Robertson 82–3, 120, 121
Niepce 117n5 Sébah 119–21, 120
Nikoloudis, Theologos 41, 235, 241, 245, Stillman 101–3, 102, 103, 104, 105
250n29, 252 Pashley, Robert 324, 328, 330
Nikoltsos, Petros 204–5, 205, 206 Peckham, Robert Shannan 26, 27
Normand, Alfred-Nicholas 81, 82 Perraud, Philibert 28–9, 29, 80
personal photography, see migrant
Observatory (Hill of Nymphs, Athens) 84, photography
122, 133 Petridis, Paris 68, 71
Olga, Queen 30, 33, 35 Philhellenes 28, 113, 114, 117, 148, 237
Olympic Games 33, 245 Philopappos 99
Orientalist art 117, 219, 317 photo-elicitation 290, 291
The Other Acropolis project 140, 143–50, photo-ethnographic installations 12, 16–17
145, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153 photobooks 14, 193–4, 195–7, 200–201,
Otto, King 28, 29, 119n6 202, 208
Ottomans 14, 32, 77, 84, 97, 115, 127, 135, The City on her Knees 194, 200, 202,
145, 146, 146, 153 203, 204, 204
Flashlight between the Teeth 194, 200,
Palestine 11, 80 205–6, 207, 207
Palmer, Eva 234 Los Angeles 194, 200, 204–5, 205, 206,
Panagia Kalamiotissa 284 207
Panayotopoulos, Nikos 65, 66 Omonoia 1980 193, 196–7, 198–9, 200,
Panorama of the 1912–1913 War 204, 206–7
(Konstantinidis) 34, 264 photograph albums 32–3, 195, 198, 268–9
Pantelidis, Stavros 88 Photographic Centre of Athens 62–3
Papadopetrakis 324 photographic events 11–12, 150, 152
INDEX 373
photographic field 8, 11, 17 realism (photographic) 60, 63 63n11, 66,

photographic portraiture 28–30, 29, 31, 67, 71, 196, 347
31–2, 39–41, 40, 44, 45 Red Cross 33, 46, 214, 244
Photographic Service of Greek army 38 resistance groups 48, 48, 49, 49–51, 148,
photographs 10, 11, 12–16, 50, 95–6, 296–7
139–40, 174, 337, 361–5 Rhomaides Brothers 85, 85
memories 13, 83, 139, 152–3, 339, 341, Richardson, Rufus B. 164, 167
364 Greece Through the Stereoscope (1907) 14,

photography 7–12, 13, 16–17, 39, 67–8, 78, 159, 162–3
95–6, 133–4, 137, 175–6, 361–6 Riefenstahl, Leni 234, 243–4, 245, 253
memory 11, 169–70, 171–2, 295 Robertson, James 27
photographic events 11–12, 150, 152 Parthenon 82–3, 120, 121
photographic field 8, 11, 17 Romaidis, A. and Zeitz, F. 35, 35
photography shop, Ikaria 303, 304–11, 305 Romanticism 69, 104, 113, 326, 332
exile photographs 15, 295–6, 304–5, Rome 100, 161
305, 306–11 Rosenthal, Joe 265
photojournalism 266, 268 Ross, Ludwig 135, 281
photolithographs 34–5, 80, 97, 195n6 Ruskin, John 100, 101
‘physiognomic problem’ 331
Pindus (mountain range) 25 Sadiku, Teuta (Albanian migrant) 342, 343,
Pinney, C. 138, 139, 278n3, 313n1, 314, 344, 348, 349, 355, 355, 356
319, 321, 330, 331, 332, 347 Salzmann, Auguste 104, 107
poems, Seferis 172, 173–5, 177, 178, 182–3, Sarandaporo, Battle of 15, 36, 257, 258–62,
184–5, 186, 188 259, 260, 263, 268, 269, 269, 271–2,
Popper, Paul 364 273
positive orientalism 330 Schliemann, Heinrich 116
Poulianos, A.N. 324, 330, 332 Scott, Clive 202
Poulidis, Petros 44–5 Sébah, Pascal 12, 14, 113, 114–15, 119,
Prangey, see Girault de Prangey, Joseph- 121, 127, 136
Philibert Acropolis of Athens 100, 115, 124, 124,
Pratt, Mary Louise 99–100 125
Prokopiou, Georgios 38 Athens 84, 113, 114, 115, 124–5, 127
propaganda photography 6, 13, 15, 46, 58, Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie en
219, 220, 234, 264–5 1873 14, 115
Propylaea 81–2, 146 Hagioi Theodoroi church 125–7, 126
Sébah 117–19, 118 Hephaisteion 122, 123, 124, 124
prosthesis 162, 177, 180, 189 Parthenon 119–21, 120
punctum (Camera Lucida) 10, 109, 185n13, Propylaea 117–19, 118
323 Sebald, W.G. 10, 194
Austerlitz 194
Rancière, Jacques 109, 152 Seferis, George 14, 170–71, 172–3, 175,
consensus 152, 153 176, 177–8, 180–84, 181, 186, 186,
dissensus 152, 153 187–90, 188, 189
Ray, Man 196, 241 Cyprus 179, 180
Meres 170 Szegedy-Maszak, Andrew 82, 83

Mythistorema 188
poems 172, 173–5, 177, 178, 182–3, Temple of Hephaistos (Theseion) 81, 115
184–5, 186, 188 Temple of Olympian Zeus 27, 80
Six Nights on the Acropolis (2007) 178–9 temporality 108, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142,
‘Thrush’ 178, 182 144, 148, 153, 169–90, 239
Sekula, Allan 63, 137, 347 Theodorakis, Mikis 286n6
self-image 318, 327, 338 Thessaloniki Museum of Photography 6

sensorial assemblages 11–12, 16 Third Hellenic Civilisation (Metaxas) 239,
Sfakia, Crete 15, 313, 314, 315–18, 319–23, 240, 247, 250, 252
324, 325, 328, 329–30, 331–2 Third Reich 239, 249
Geraki 316–18, 317, 320, 321, 321–2, Thomas, Dylan 175
323, 325–6, 327, 332 Tloupas, Takis 6, 25n1, 57
Nelly 326–7, 327, 328, 329, 331 Todorova, Maria 215n3
Sikelianos Angelos 234 tourists 41, 54–6, 57, 68, 356–7
Sklavounos, Anastasios 88 Toynbee, Arnold J. 215, 216–17, 218, 219,
Solomon Islands 323 220, 221, 230
Sontag, Susan 186–7, 228, 237, 243, 244, Greco-Turkish war 15, 213–16, 221–6,
340 222, 223, 224, 227–9, 229
Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, Elli, see Nelly Nationality and the War (1915) 219n6
Sparta, Peloponnese 164, 165 The Western Question in Greece and
Stallabras, Julian 68 Turkey (1922) 214, 221
Stathatos, John 6, 7, 13, 62, 69 Toynbee, Rosalind 213–30
Image and Idol 6, 7 Trachtenberg, Alan 41
‘New Greek Photography’ 7, 62, 67 traveller-photographers 78–80, 81, 83, 84,
Steichen, Edward 58, 266–7 90, 113, 115–16
Family of Man, The (photographic Triantafyllou, Soti 197
exhibition, 1955) 58, 266–7 Los Angeles (2007) 194, 200, 204–5,
stereoscopes 14, 88n18, 159–64, 165, 166, 205, 206, 207
167 Trikoupis, Harilaos 30, 31, 44
Stillman, William J. 4, 12, 82, 83, 90, Tsarouchis, Yannis 193
100–101, 104, 106–7, 109 Tsirgialou, Aliki 13
Acropolis of Athens 100, 105–6, Turkish mosques 80, 84
107–8, 136 Twitter 17
The Acropolis of Athens 13–14, 101–4,
105 Underwood and Underwood News Photos
Crete 88, 104, 106 Inc. 88–9, 160, 161, 162, 165
Parthenon 101–3, 102, 103, 104, 105 Underwood Travel System 160, 162
street photography 46, 64, 65, 200, 202 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
studium (Camera Lucida) 10, 109 Administration (UNRRA) 58
Syros, island of 87, 87
Szarkowski, John 63 Vafiadakis, Giorgos 57
INDEX 375
Valéry, Paul 175, 176 Wells, L. 6, 150

Venios, Spyros 87 Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place,
Venizelos, Eleftherios 36, 37, 219n8, and Identity 6
220, 220n11, 221, 234, 235, 245, Wendell Holmes, Oliver 166
250n29, 252 ‘Western gaze’ 56
vernacular photography 13 Wheatstone, Charles 159
Ververis, Apostolos 267 Wilson Bridges, George 84
visual culture 233, 236, 338 Winstrup, Laurits 281

visual recognisability 314–15 Woodhouse, C.M. 26, 31, 36
Vlachakis, Andreas 87, 87 World War II (WWII) 35, 45–6, 247–8,
von Gaertringen, Hillier 281 252–3, 265, 273
war memorial museums, see military Xanthakis, Alkis 6

museums History of Greek Photography (1981) 6
War of Independence (1821–29) 3, 29
war paintings 263, 264, 273 Yerolymbos, Yiorgis 68, 71
war photographs 15, 257–8, 262, 264–5, Yosuke, Yamahata 265
273
Balkan Wars 34–5, 35, 257, 258, 263–5, Zacharia, Katerina 6, 15
270, 271, 271, 272 Zachariades Brothers 86
Battle of Sarandaporo 15, 36, 257, Zachariades, Zacharias 86, 86
258–62, 259, 260, 263, 268, 269,
269, 271–2, 273

Camera Graeca Photographs Narratives Materialities 2015

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Camera Graeca Photographs Narratives Materialities 2015

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:54 08 June 2017

Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:54 08 June 2017

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

THE CENTRE FOR HELLE NIC STUDIES ,

Capturing the Eternal Light: Photography and Greece,

Part I: Imag(in)ing the Nation

1 The Three-way Mirror:

2 Greece as Photograph: Histories, Photographies, Theories  53

3 Photographing Greece in the Nineteenth Century: An Overview  77

5 Photographing the Present, Constructed with the Past:

Part II: Photographic Narratives,

6 The Photographic and the Archaeological: The ‘Other Acropolis’  133

7 Greece through the Stereoscope:

Constituting Spectatorship through Texts and Images  159

9 Textual Contexts of Consumption: The Greek Literary Photobook  193

Part III: Photographic Matter-Realities:

10 Once Upon a Time in Asia Minor: Arnold and Rosalind Toynbee’s

11 Nelly’s Iconography of Greece  233

12 War Photographs Re-used: An Approach to the

Part IV: Photographic Ethnographies:

13 From ‘Here and Now’ to ‘Then and There’:

14 Pictures of Exile, Memories of Cohabitation:

15 Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images:

16 Projecting Places: Personal Photographs,

Photography and Greece – A Historian’s Perspective  361

This page has been left blank intentionally

3.1 Alfred-Nicolas Normand, The Arch of Adrian with the Acropolis in

4.1 Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, ‘Parthenon at Athens,’ from

4.4 William J. Stillman, ‘Profile of the Eastern façade, showing the

6.1 Two photographic projects on the Acropolis: J.-F. Bonhomme’s book

7.1 Unknown photographer, Market day at Sparta, Peloponnese,

8.1 George Seferis, Alona, Cyprus, 1954  179

10.1 Unknown photographer, A.J. Toynbee at the British School of

10.5 Unknown photographer, Child from Pazarkeni mutilated by

11.1 Nelly, Collage of Greek physiognomies exhibited in the

12.1 Unknown photographer, Transportation of injured at the Battle of

13.1 Margaret Kenna, Another camera at the festival? 8 September 1966 278

14.1 Kostantinos Petroyannis, Group of exiles in Koudoumas village,

14.3 Unknown photographer, Group of exiles working for the road of

15.1 Konstantinos Kalantzis, Nikos Karkanis showing me a framed,

Philip Carabott is a Research Associate at King’s College London, where he

Theodoros Chiotis studied Classics in London and Oxford and Modern

Georgios Giannakopoulos is currently a PhD student at Queen Mary, University

Heather E. Grossman teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

Building Identity in the Medieval Morea (Ashgate, forthcoming 2015). Grossman’s

Yannis Hamilakis is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton.

Fotis Ifantidis studied archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki,

Kostas Ioannidis is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism in the

Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of History and Visual Culture at Durham

the National Photographic Collection is housed.

Konstantinos Kalantzis studied history and archaeology in Crete (BA) as well

Margaret E. Kenna is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Swansea

Eleni Kouki is a graduate of the Department of History and Archaeology at the

Elena Mamoulaki is a Research Fellow at Durham University. She holds a PhD

Eleni Mouzakiti is a photographer and independent scholar. She has taught

Penelope Papailias teaches anthropology in the Department of History,

Eleni Papargyriou is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London,

Katerina Zacharia is Professor of Classics at Loyola Marymount University, Los

This page has been left blank intentionally

2 Greece as Photograph: Histories, Photographies, Theories 53

3 Photographing Greece in the Nineteenth Century: An Overview 77

6 The Photographic and the Archaeological: The ‘Other Acropolis’ 133

Constituting Spectatorship through Texts and Images 159

9 Textual Contexts of Consumption: The Greek Literary Photobook 193

11 Nelly’s Iconography of Greece 233

Photography and Greece – A Historian’s Perspective 361

8.1 George Seferis, Alona, Cyprus, 1954 179

13.1 Margaret Kenna, Another camera at the festival? 8 September 1966 278