Some months ago, talking with Yiorgos about his future plans, he told me he wanted us all to meet again in a photographic ‘series’. The idea was to take photographs of all of us who had met together fifteen years ago (when we were looking for solutions to the creation of the Photography Centre of Athens) as well as all the other younger friends who had met us later on and had stayed with us until today. He told me he would take a photo of each of us lying on a bed naked, covered with a white sheet, gazing at nowhere, as if we were playing dead. He would display the photos in the gallery horizontally, like the racks that jut out of the wall of a morgue. They will be us, the photographers, collectors of situations, of people, of corpses. Mortalisers’ petrified in the ultimate pose. Because the meaning of death, at least one small death, is involved in every photographic action not as a delivery from corruption, from oblivion, nor as an immortalisation, but as a destruction, a numbing, an abduction. The photographs we have taken are not simply pieces of paper-they are the moments of life, our lives and other’s lives. That is why the photograph is different from other representational art forms. It is connected with life, with our presence in the past when we were standing in front the subject-the person or situation-and we are the only ones who know if what we captured from the person or situation was what it actually appears to be in the photograph. In our photomortuary we would be ready for the post mortem by the act of being looked at deeply in the eyes. The presentation of the photographs will be such that, at the beginning, the viewer will think that it’s all very serious, until the last photo where Yiorgos, photographed by himself, will have one eye meaningfully closed. So it’s theatre? it’s life? it’s a passion? it’s a vision? It’s a perversion? Or it’s a little of each, according to his mood? I said OK to him, we will be photographed as you wish, but, as I was lying on the bed that he had prepared for the session and looked at the camera I started to think that the idea was not funny at all.
Costis Antoniadis 15/12/95