The
hottest subject for computer games these days is zombies. Blank-eyed,
shuffling, homicidal, the living dead who pursue and are pursued by the
player down the endless avenues, streets and alleys of anonymous city
centres. City centres like the Omonia-Syntagma-Thiseion triangle,
decaying heart of Athens and the subject of Stelios Efstathopoulos’
latest photographic sequence. Currently showing at the Hellenic American
Union, Athens Within
focuses on the area’s shifting population, but the real protagonist
seems to be the disintegrating environment through which the former move
or drift.
There is
nothing remotely nostalgic about this dystopic view of Athens,
dominated as it is by brutalist concrete architecture seen from the
worst possible angle, namely from street level and close-up. Through
narrow concrete and brick labyrinths, past the signs of a consumerist
economy on its last legs, through drifts of rubbish, moves a population
seemingly lost, drugged or at best, indifferent. There are few signs of
either community or redemption: just two street people sharing a
cigarette, a child absorbed in play, the stray dogs with their
irrepressible jauntiness. Every available surface seems to have been
defaced either by graffitied tags or the much vaster surfaces of
graffiti “art”, though it is hard to tell which of these two forms of
vandalism is the more aggressive and contemptuous of the social
contract. Greece has no very strong tradition of street photography in either the French (Cartier-Bresson) or the American (William Klein) style; the best examples we have tend either to the grotesque and sardonic, as do the street portraits of Periklis Alkidis, or to the surrealist quasi-abstraction of Nikos Panayotopoulos’ Common Imaginary Places. Efstathopoulos’ contribution, all the more welcome and surprising for going against the grain of most contemporary Greek photographic production, is an impressive addition to the genre. It is also, seen from the perspective of the current social and economic crisis in which Greece appear to inexorably mired, a saddening requiem to what was once a vibrant (if never particularly elegant) capital city centre, now reduced to the status of stage setting for a zombie hunt…
photography: Stelios Efstathopoulos: Athens Within, 2011
article source: DRY LIGHT, by John Stathatos
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