I started photography at an early age, being the kid with the camera at school capturing snapshots of my friends and learning how that little box was working. Never thought much of it back then but when I was studying engineering in England, in the coastal town of Brighton, the sea and the surrounding rural areas appealed to my senses and I found myself more out there than actually attending University, always having a small pocket film camera in hand.
Though I loved going around in England, actual travelling came later on when I was discharged from the army, a period in my life in which I have travelled a lot around Greece and met some beautiful remote places, although in the form of army barracks. After leaving I wanted to see more outside the confines of the Hellenic army so I took my car and started driving. From north to south, in mountain ranges and islands; I wanted to see a Greece that not a lot of people had seen, a land that is reserved only for the locals living in it and not found in tourist brochures.
Sure, the islands are a famous summer destination, but there are also mountains with peaks exceeding two thousand meters high, virgin forests up north with flora and fauna unique to the world, deep gorges and jagged peaks in a mountain range that consists the spine of central Greece.
As a result, I decided to leave my birthplace Athens and move to a small village of ten people up in the mountains of northwestern Greece to practice photography and try to express myself through this medium. I have been practicing landscape photography for more than fifteen years now with my style going through all the phases that I believe landscape photographers experience. From snapshots to visually appealing shots and where I currently am now, in the search for a more profound meaning for my images that exceed the aesthetic and visual pleasing part.
This search for profoundness dictates my philosophy in photography as stated on my website where I talk about the “inner landscape” and the need for a photographer to shed the layers that society and culture have added on us in order to find the clear view we had as a child – essentially saying that meaningful images come from within. The landscape only provides the stimuli in order for us to pick up the camera and create the image when we actually feel a connection with it and not because the conditions are epic. I am not interested in showing the landscape as it is, but rather in showing my personality through the landscape. I believe this is the key aspect of being unique and not just a copycat of trends and well-worn compositions because there is only one me.
There is the opportunity for that great ‘trophy’ shot, but we don’t hunt for it. If it happens, it happens and we achieved it because of ‘our routine and techniques we learned’, but this isn’t something I am interested in anymore. I would be dishonest to my clients if I was to teach them just that which frankly is a very easy thing to do. You just have to follow some guidelines when you are composing. Constructed images are simple to achieve both in the field and in post processing and this is not something I want my participants to remember me for.
I want my workshops to be more than how to crop, stitch, blend, and compose with super wide angle lenses. I want the people who attend my workshops to return home and have a rekindled interest in photography, to be ready to do their soul-searching that will make them unique. And I want them not be disappointed because after investing time and money the weather just didn’t cooperate and they didn’t get that trophy shot. The same goes for the editing procedure too. The better you capture that fleeting emotion you felt and which made you take the shot, the less you will need to do in the post production because the image is already there. Advanced editing, multiple shots and too much thinking is not something I practice anymore…
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Even though I could write a lengthy paragraph on that subject, but I just reverse the question and ask the viewer at the gallery or a workshop participant who asked me this question what they think my photographs say about me. It isn’t that I don’t want to answer, despite my natural shyness. I want the viewer to stop and think, to look deep in the picture and try to feel it, and spend some time on it. This is very beneficial because in turn, they will do the same with all the images they see – especially their own, hoping to understand which ones are actually connected to their hearts.
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