Greece

Photography

Gasworks (Photography)

Gasworks

By Nikos Markou

Nikos Markou’s aesthetic – black-and-white film, shot with available light, stark yet intimate – is the perfect complement to the space of the Gasworks and those who work there. Unlike the Bechers, he goes past the building’s façade to catch glimpses of capitalism’s inner workings: men showering, relaxing, laboring in this plant that looks like it came out of a 1940s prison movie. In fact, Markou took these photographs in 1982–1984 at the Athens Gasworks, right before it ceased its operations, and years before it became the museum it is today. His photographs show the plant in its last iconic gasp.

Markou writes about this series, “What urged me to start working on this project was originally the look of the factory itself which, back then, had a dry unique character. I was interested in getting to know the workers so I started visiting them regularly, watching them work and depicting their lives any way I could. What I experienced throughout this process was definitely much more powerful than what is depicted in the photos, yet I hope that these manage to express, to a certain extent, the hardships that these people had to endure trying to make a living.”


Nikos Markou was born in Athens in 1959. He studied mathematics in Athens. He first entered the photographic scene with the publication of Perama in 1980 while also commencing his professional career in advertising and teaching photography (1985–1998). His interest focuses on the Greek landscape and people, and he has published two photographic monographs (Geometries, 1999, and Cosmos, 2003). He works with magazines, publishing houses, and large-scale export companies, while at the same time his works belong to private and public collections. He lives and works in Athens. Learn more about his work here.

You might also like…
Nikos Markou’s Perama
John Brian King’s LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84

Photography

Ioanna Chronopoulou (Photography)

Photographs by Ioanna Chronopoulou

dichotomy < Greek dichotomía:
The images in my ongoing project “Dichotomy” are rooted in their literal meaning. A division into two parts. A subdivision into halves or pairs. A division into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups. It’s this logical rationale that informs the pictures of the series “Dichotomy,” each set relative to the other yet wholly independent. A series of relationships we are asked to explore, to form. A subjective view of ordinary life, places and objects that are imbued with their own history. A story about Athens, but also a story for every city that is built by society and is left to fend to itself. – Ioanna Chronopoulou


Born in Athens in 1990, Ioanna Chronopoulou graduated from the Focus School of Art, Photography, and New Technologies in 2013. She continued her photographic studies in the research residency programs of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. She currently works as a freelance photographer, and as a Photo Editor for Kathimerini Newspaper’s Κ Magazine. You can visit her website here.