The Other City
The Other City is a series shot in several cities based on the idea I have followed through several suites of photographs of all the cities represented merging and dissolving into each other through the photographer's memories and dreams to become The City.
Collectors' Hardback Edition Book. 210mm x 215mm. 200 gsm silk paper. 184 pages.
The Other City
The Other City is a series shot in several cities based on the idea I have followed through several suites of photographs of all the cities represented merging and dissolving into each other through the photographer's memories and dreams to become The City.
Collectors' Hardback Edition Book. 210mm x 215mm. 200 gsm silk paper. 184 pages.
The In-Between (Diaspora)
From where is it possible to begin? All Greeks are used to living among ruins, even those, like me, who are offspring of two diasporas; the first one being the exchange of populations after the end of the Ottoman Empire, and second being the great diaspora of Greeks after World War Two. The latter scattered Greeks to several countries and continents, primarily to the United States and Australia and, in my case, England via Canada, where I was born. How is it possible to present a continuous narrative out of diaspora, when diaspora involves interruption, a shattering of history, biography, and identity? And this is even more true of the refugee experience, considering the violence that is done to their narratives. I have come to think that my tendency to write in fragments and, as a photographer, to deal in fragments, has something to do with such uprootedness. But maybe openness to other people, other histories, other cultures, is also the result of being a child of the Greek diaspora. Borders offer limits but also invite us to exceed those limits.
In diaspora, who can afford a native language when one is always between languages, between names, my name, John Perivolaris? Christened Ιωάννης, informally Yiannis, in a Greek Orthodox church in Montreal, that city in-between, my parents decided that I become John. The cost of integrating in the Canadian and, subsequently, British melting pot of their aspirations. I drift in and out of words, languages, and images, suspended between them by photography, whose in-between gives space for the imagination to wander. It is the place of silence. The pause where encounters take place. The important thing is the space between.
AP (1935-2021)
A sequel to Perivolaris's Pandemicon 2020-21. AP (1935-2021) marks the personal cost of the Covid-19 pandemic, to which the photographer lost his mother. Through a combination of family album photographs, diary pages, and his own photographs, Perivolaris presents fragments of his mother's life and his family's experience of migration.
Pandemicon 2020-2021
This book chronicles my passage through Glasgow, London, Genoa, Milan, and Athens during the ebb and flow of the 2020 - 2021 Coronavirus pandemic.
The wearing of protective masks is the visual motif that connects the overall series and, in a sense, makes those I have photographed citizens of the same city. The intention is to leave a trace of my personal experience of the pandemic as it has affected our shared lives in several European cities. The choice of cities followed the course of my own life during this period as I emerged from full lockdown on the island of Arran into cities that felt very different to my eye after a period of isolation.
As the opportunity has arisen I have made it my purpose to photograph the cities I know best, since these for me seem the most defamiliarised by the pandemic. In addition, Genoa introduced a historical resonance to the series, having been the first West European city to have been struck by bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, Athens has always been for me a symbol of endurance against the odds, most recently due to the 2008 economic crisis.
The pandemic has affected all of us and all societies. In my case, this suite of photographs is dedicated to my mother, Adamantia Perivolaris (1935-2021), who passed away on 11 January 2021, due to complications arising from COVID - 19.
[Π Press, 2021, 92 Pages, Case Bound, Silk Paper (170 gms)]
Frankie Roberston: Sage of the Clyde
Glasgow resident Frankie Robertson is a man of remarkable individuality. This is book of images chronicles my growing friendship with him and the conversations we have had. We first met in the Barras, Glasgow. Since Frankie told me that as soon as he has some money he'll be gone, we decided that it would be a good idea to make some photographs together before he leaves.
An artist, a poet, but above all a mystic and a Cynic philosopher, when we first met, Frankie corrected me when I described him as a shaman, letting it be known that he preferred to be known as a sage. My photographs attempt to record Frankie’s world of intense colours and deep shadows.
One of the photographs here was taken after Frankie attested that everything is `now', including the future and the past; after bearing witness to the fact that sainthood preceded buddhahood. All I know is that, like the Mona Lisa, Frankie cannot be bought nor sold.
City of Wherever
It is hard to place myself in the passage through cities too numerous to recognise or remember and whose names I do not care to recall. In their passage through the lens those cities have become the City. At the same time unique and interchangeable, their kaleidoscope rotation through the camera opens new paths following a torn map whose fragments I have collected as I cross shadowy porticoes and bridges in search of new vistas by seeing through walls; drifting across frontiers on trains and ships with a camera as my home.
The City, still as it is in these photographs, still escapes me. It always will, while I am still here, and when I am gone.
But we never run the risk of being truly lost in the City, merely biding our time as we wait, more often unknowingly, to be called forth to testify to its passing and ours. Always a race against the clock to frame before being framed, grazing off the skin of the City as our skin is grazed by its iron, steel, and stone. Invisibility unravels and is brought into light as a thread of images criss-crossing the City, tracing its streets, bridges, and subway lines. The indifference of passing trains to laughter or screams. The silence of photographs.