Table of contents:
- 1. Flea market
- 2. Palestinian children
- 3. Gypsies
- 4. The younger generation
- 5. Local residents
- 6. Horse farm
- 7. Portrait photography
- 8. Flea market
- 9. Central street
Video: Documentary photographs that transfer to another reality
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
“Being on the road, traveling without a specific goal, I look around with curiosity and wonder what I come across. During the shooting, the process of thinking somehow stops. It's like playing games with reality,”- this is how Nikos Economopoulos tells about his work. And when you look at his photographs, you really are transported into another reality.
1. Flea market
2. Palestinian children
Nikos Economopoulos was born in 1953 in Kalamata, on the Peloponnese island. He began taking photographs in the late 1970s, but only in 1988 he decided to make his hobby the main profession. By that time, he felt that photographing on weekends and holidays was not enough for him.
3. Gypsies
Economopoulos studied law in Parma, after which he worked as a journalist. I didn’t think about the profession of a photographer, but I bought books about photography with pleasure. “Just as some people like to read books or listen to music, I also enjoyed flipping through photo books,” says Economopoulos.
4. The younger generation
In 1988 he began shooting a series of photographs in Greece and Turkey, which has grown into a long-term project. In 2001, this cycle brought the author the Abdi Ipekchi Peace and Friendship Prize for improving relations between the Greek and Turkish people.
5. Local residents
In 1990, Economopoulos joined the Magnum agency and his photographs began to appear in newspapers and magazines around the world. During the same period, he began to travel a lot in the Balkans and take photographs. In the mid-1990s, his book "In the Balkans" was published.
6. Horse farm
Nikos Economopoulos has developed his own style of photography, in which the balanced proportions of documentary and artistic photography bring the aesthetic component to the fore. “Forget the journalistic approach. What we are looking for is not a journalistic event. This is a photographic event,”the photographer expresses his position, instructing young colleagues.
7. Portrait photography
Between 1999 and 2000, he was involved in the emigration of ethnic Albanians leaving Kosovo. Probably, this is the only photographer who decided to travel to Turkey, which was hostile in the 1990s, and received the Abdi Ipektsi Award in 2001 for peace and friendship between Greece and Turkey.
8. Flea market
Nikos's works reveal complex topics, they are made as if from the inside of a situation. He can be called a writer rather than a photographer. He stopped treating photography as part of the visual arts and began to perceive it as part of literature. It is noteworthy that until 2010 all of Economopoulos's works were exclusively black and white and made on film. It is only in recent years that color photographs have appeared in digital form.
9. Central street
In his photographs, the viewer will find a look at life through the eyes of a person who has visited different sides of cultural and ethnic barriers. They bring life, poetry, as ambiguous as our world.
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