Photographing the Crypto-Colony: counter-hegemonic narratives in contemporary Greek photography

Photographing the Crypto-Colony Counter-hegemonic narratives in contemporary Greek photography Christos Petritzis BA Criticism, Communication and Curation February 16, 2015

ABSTRACT Contemporary photography theory tells us that photographs always emerge out of a context and an ideology, and are never neutral reproductions of reality. The first photographic renderings of Greece in the 19th century by Europeans were dominated by an idealised perception of classical antiquity and had little to do with the contemporaneous social scenery. In the mode of ‘self-colonisation’, some Greek photographers imitated this gaze and adopted it as the one true view of their world. These representational strategies then reverberated through domestic photographic production, illustrating the pervasiveness of hegemonic narratives and the influence the countries of the West have had on the modern Greek nation, ever since its early years. Following the wide establishment of these image-making tactics, Greek photographic production in the 1970s (after the restitution of democracy and the emergence of radical theoretical texts on photography) is thereon shaped as an oppositional force to such reductive representations, excluding notions of the ‘mythical Greece’ trope from its discourse. This essay’s focus is the 21st century and it unravels in a linear mode, employing three case studies – from 2000 to 2004 to 2011. Omonia 2000 (2000) by Stratos Kalafatis, the first case study, consists of such a rejection of the aforementioned monumentality that usually ran through representations of Greece, instead elevating everyday occurrences in the Athenian ‘underbelly’. Next, Gerasimos Domenikos’ Olympiad photographs (2004) return to monumental moments, in a double-coded documentation of the Athenian Olympic spectacle. Finally, Panos Kokkinias’ “Leave Your Myth in Greece” (2011) series converses with the archetypal representations of Greece, to deliver a parody of Greek tourism discourses and strategies. All three photographers interrogate Greece’s relationship with the overarching presence of the West, which some scholars have come to call crypto-colonial.

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INTRODUCTION

Part One: The intersection of ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’ gazes

In the highly influential, oft-cited and frequently criticized, but nevertheless seminal On Photography, Susan Sontag professes that the photographic medium’s inherent qualities are power and subordination. In the quintessential Sontag vernacular, she uses terms like “imperial”, “predatory” and “voyeuristic” throughout the book to describe photographs, as she proceeds to deconstruct the photographic “enterprise”.1 The camera is an object of power, of knowledge; it is a “gun” that “shoots” objects. On Photography, which consists of several original essays that were initially published in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977, was published as a whole in 1977. Alongside other crucial theoretical texts that were published around the same time (such as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing), it marked a paradigm shift in photography criticism, underlining the photograph’s function as an ideologically loaded representation, and not an unmediated, mechanical reproduction of reality. “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera”,2 Sontag writes, as she specifically references the primal years of the medium – the 1840s and 1850s, “photography’s glorious first two decades […], during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs”.3 Sontag’s claim regarding photography’s imperial scope in the mid-19th century points to one of photography’s earliest applications, when the newly invented medium was instantly put to use in countries with a ‘glorious’ ancient past. Some of the first photographs ever were in fact produced amongst Egyptian

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 Linfield, Susie. "A Little History of Photography Criticism" In The cruel radiance: photography and political violence. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 5. 2 Sontag, Susan. "In Plato's Cave" In On photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. 7. 3 Ibid.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction (p. 1-18) Chapter One: Modernisation (2000) Charting the urban experience in the millennium: liminality and the loss of

communality in Omonia 2000 (p. 19-25)

Chapter Two: Utopia (2004) Tracing the 2004 Olympic dreamscape in the photographs of Gerasimos

Domenikos (p. 26-37)

Chapter Three: Crisis (2011) Thematologising the Greek economic crisis: “Leave Your Myth In Greece” (p. 38-45)

Conclusion Counter-hegemonic narratives in the end of history (p. 46- 48)!

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antiquities, as European photographers migrated to the north African country en masse, on an exoticist mission to record and catalog the rest of the world.4 These early photographic depictions of Egypt focus primarily on the ancient pyramids, one of the most popular subjects to photograph at the time. In line with On Photography’s central contention that a photographic representation reveals more about the culture of the photographer than the culture being photographed, the daguerreotypes produced by European photographers in Egypt reflect their own enamourment with ancient Egypt and none of the region’s contemporaneous realities. In deciding how a region is portrayed, the subject-object relationship of coloniser vs. colonised,5 which long preceded the invention of photography, was automatically re-established, this time through the use of the camera as “a violent means of visual appropriation”.6 Greece suffered a similar fate in regards to its representation, in the hands of the travelling European photographers of the 19th century. The stretch of land on the southeastern tip of the Balkan Peninsula, heir to the physical birthplace of the Classics and geographical home to the newly-founded nation state of modern Greece, was photographed extensively then. European photographers like Francis Frith, Félix Bonfils and James Robertson produced numerous famous photographs in Greece that have since been archived by the Victoria and Albert Museum, all of which focused exclusively on historical sites. These Westerners looked for different things in the place than its inhabitants, who at the time virtually disregarded ancient ruins as obstructions in their everyday landscape.7 The ‘Western gaze’ as it was manifested in Greece can thus be defined as a particular way of looking at and perceiving the world that reflects prevalent Western ideologies of the time, namely the romantic idealisation of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 Behdad, Ali. "Introduction" In Photography's Orientalism: new essays on colonial representation. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013. 2. 5 Wells, Liz. Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1997. 42 6 Behdad, Photography’s Orientalism, 3. 7 Giannakopoulou, Gianna. “Modern antiquity: An introduction to Athenian metropolitan modernity”, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, no. 1 (2015): 113–118.

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ancient Greece. As Nikos Panayotopoulos, one of the leading theorists on Greek photography, writes:

Soon Greece became the signifier of mythical values. Already a representation in itself, and, as had happened in Egypt, the Greek nation was re-created in terms of the European view of world history and arranged into a repertoire of items, themes and sites, upon which future writers, painters and travellers drew extensively. […] Evidence of interest in other subjects, such as the contemporary social scene or modern Greek architecture, is almost non-existent. Greece was less a contemporaneous political entity than a stone theatre of frozen time: its essence was defined as the ruin and the archaeological site.8

fig. 1, 2: Francis Frith, The Parthenon, Athens and Athens Temple of Victory (between 1850-1870).

The Greek landscape became then, filtered through the lens of groundbreaking visual technologies, the “repository of the symbols of its ancient past”.9 By only focusing on depopulated landscapes, Western photographers made a simple, yet grand statement – that the other parts of the Greek reality were not worth seeing, namely that the local inhabitants were not as interesting or as awe-inspiring as their classical ‘forefathers’. Landscape shots of the decayed remnants of antiquity are ever-present, ready for the Westerner to project his pre-conceived notions over, yet people are

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Panayotopoulos, Nikos. "On Greek Photography: Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece." Third Text 23, no. 2 (2009): 184-185. 9 Dora, Veronica Della. "Science, Cosmopolitanism, and the Greek Landscape: The Cruises of the Revue Générale Des Sciences Pures Et Appliquées to the Eastern Mediterranean, 1897-1912." Journal of Modern Greek Studies, no. 30 (2012): 215.

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nowhere to be seen. This adoration of antiquity, paired with contempt for Greece’s local inhabitants, undeniably constitutes a variation of the reductive representational tactics dissected in Edward Said’s Orientalism.10 But unlike the Asian cultures which Said writes about, Greece is not part of the ‘Orient’ per se, nor was it ever under the direct rule of Western colonial powers (besides the British ‘protection’ of the Ionian Islands between 1807 and 1863).11 Indeed, the small country of Greece occupies a peculiar position in the Western cultural imagination:12 an illustrious classical past, which informs European thought to this day, followed by a disappointing ‘Oriental’ present, thanks to its more recent Ottoman legacy.13 As such, we cannot talk about a literally ‘postcolonial’ reading of Greece and its representations; Maria Todorova has argued that when discussing the countries of the Balkans, the term semicolonial is more common, albeit ultimately “meaningless”.14 Other terms have also been suggested by theorists to describe the colonial relations of power that have defined Greece’s historical encounters with the West, such as Michael Herzfeld’s discourse of crypto-colonialism.15 According to Herzfeld, Greece has always been under the influence of the “absent presence” of the West, albeit at times not explicitly under its military rule – a “combination of force and consent”,16 following the notion of cultural hegemony first conceptualised by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. The country has been “subjected to the material effects of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 11 Kolocotroni, Vassiliki. "Introduction." In Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel, 7. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 12 Hamilakis, Yannis. The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Back-cover. 13 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. "’Casting’ the Neohellenic ‘Other': Tourism, the Culture Industry, and Contemporary Orientalism in ‘Captain Corelli's Mandolin' (2001)." Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 3(2) (2003): 232. 14 Todorova, Maria. "Introduction" In Imagining the Balkans, 17. Updated ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 15Michael Herzfeld. "The Absence Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism." The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 900-903. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed January 15, 2015). 16 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited by Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 80.

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colonization in similar ways to colonies proper”,17 functioning as a “colonial paradigm within the geographical borders of Europe”.18 Political independence was traded for economic dependence:

I shall call [this phenomenon] crypto-colonialism and define it as the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence […] they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence. […] [The crypto-colonies] appear to resist domination, but do so at the cost of effective complicity – a model that […] closely approaches the Gramscian

definition of hegemony […].19

The images produced in Greece in the 19th century under the supervision of the Western gaze are very much in line with the European version of world history according to which classical Greece constitutes the dawn of Western civilisation. “The appropriation of ancient Greek culture and its elevation to the founding status of Western civilisation was only a gradual and a controversial historical process”,20 which emerged alongside the revival of classical learning in Europe in the Enlightenment era – this supposed progression happened as follows: “from ancient Greece to Rome to feudal Christian Europe to capitalist Europe”.21 According to this historiographical model, Greece is always placed at the very beginning of the narrative concerning modern European civilisation. Named the ‘Aryan model’, it has been thoroughly questioned, and to an extent debunked by the historian Martin Bernal on the grounds of it being a Western

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!17 "Commodifying Classical Antiquity: Greek Photography and Archaeological Ruins." In Imaging History. Photography after the Fact, edited by Bruno Vandermeulen and Danny Veys, by Iro Katsaridou and Anastasia Kontogiorgi, Brussel: ASA Publishers, 2011. 46. 18 Kolocotroni, Vassiliki. "Introduction." In Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel, 8. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 19 Herzfeld, Michael. "The Absence Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism." The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 899-926. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed January 15, 2015). 20 Todorova, Maria. "Introduction." In Imagining the Balkans. Updated ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 9. 21 Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. London: Zed Books, 1988. 89-91.

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ideological conception,22 whereby the European ruling classes invented their political and intellectual genealogies.23 And while classical Greece is consistently viewed as the foundation of modern European thought, modern Greece is rarely included in narratives concerning the contemporary West. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova quotes a British author from the beginning of the 20th century that is exemplary of this mentality: “The Greek is racially and geographically European, but he is not a Western [sic]. […] He is Oriental in a hundred ways, but his Orientalism is not Asiatic. He is the bridge between the East and West. . .”24 It is perhaps too easy a metaphor to say that Greece is a bridge between East and West, but this analogy is not exactly untrue, either. As demonstrated in the above passage, the country has been documented in literature as the most paradoxical of places, a place of crossroads, occupying both a metaphorical as well as a geographical, liminal grey area between East and West,25 Europe and ‘Orient’, ruins and modernity, past and present, metropolis and periphery. These antinomies constitute a large part of the schismatic modern Greek identity. The crypto-colony’s defining quality is that its present is forever destined to remain inadequate compared to its luscious past in the eyes of the West.26 In the hostile climate that followed the global recession of 2008, the international press did not fail to rehash the age-old tirade of present-day Greeks as disappointing continuations of their classical ‘ancestors’. One cover of a popular German news magazine was particularly condemned in Greece, for portraying the ancient Greek statue of Venus de Milo giving readers the middle

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22 Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987. 23 Plantzos, Dimitris. "The Glory That Was Not: Embodying the Classical in Contemporary Greece." Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no. 2 (2012): 148. 24 Todorova, Maria. "Introduction." In Imagining the Balkans. Updated ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 16. 25 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. 18. 26 Plantzos, Dimitris. "Dead Archaeologists, Buried Gods" In Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, : Oxford University Press, 2014.153.

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finger; an allegorical visual implying Greece’s supposedly well-deserved exit from the European Union.27 It becomes clear that Greece is not understood as a vital part of Europe, of the ‘eternal’ West, but merely its “provincial part of periphery”,28 hence the confusing questions that Greeks are asked to answer: ‘Are Greeks Really European?’29 is the title of a 2011 article published in The International Business Times, pointing to Greece’s economic ineptitude as an ‘un-European’ trait and there are innumerable others like it in the global press circuit.

fig. 3: a page from The Photographic Heritage of The Middle East: Exhibition of Early Photographs of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Iran, 1849-93 (1981) .

A quick cross-search of the British Library’s catalogues will yield hundreds of results that verify Greece’s ambiguous ‘European-ness’. One particular photographic anthology published recently in 1981,30 entitled The Photographic Heritage of The Middle East: Exhibition of Early Photographs of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!27 The Guardian, "Insulted Greeks to sue over German magazine's bailout 'cheats' claim," April 21, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/21/greeks-sue-german-magazine-cheat-claims (accessed October 5, 2014) 28 Todorova, Maria. "Introduction" In Imagining the Balkans. Updated ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 17. 29 Ghosh, Palash. "Are Greeks Really European?" International Business Times. Accessed February 14, 2015. http://www.ibtimes.com/are-greeks-really-european-212891. 30 That is to say 2 years before Greece’s official entry into the European Economic Community.

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Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Iran, 1849-93,31 even categorises (as evidenced by its title) Greece as a Middle Eastern country, therefore ascribing it the identity of the ‘Oriental’ Other. 19th century photographs of ancient temples such as the Parthenon and the Athens Temple of Victory are present in this volume, including some by the aforementioned Victorian photographer Francis Frith. These early photographic representations ultimately came to define the view of Greece in the indigenous imagination. In the 19th century “rhetoric of transparency and truth”32 that governed the taking and viewing of photographs, Greek photographers imitated the Western gaze, as it had ‘colonised’ their consciousness, causing thereon the Western and indigenous gazes to converge. Panayotopoulos uses Nelly as a case study, the Greek photographer hailing from Asia Minor whose work in the inter-war period exemplifies this “self-colonising”33 tendency of Greek photographers to internalise and emulate the dominant Western rhetoric regarding their native environment. Nelly’s neoclassical pictures, such as her immaculately choreographed composition of Nikolska dancing at the Parthenon (1929) (fig. 4), reflect a desired image, not the real image of Greece, which underwent a period of tumultuous historic events in those and the following years: the Metaxas dictatorship (between 1936 and 1940), the war against Italy (1940-41), the Nazi occupation (1941-1944), the British involvement (1945-46), the Civil War (1946-49), which also marked the transition from Britain’s sphere of control to that of the United States.34 This chain of events is also illustrative of a small part of the rampant occupations and foreign interference Greece subsisted, despite being nominally ‘independent’.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!31 Chevedden, Paul E. Photographic Heritage of The Middle East: Exhibition of Early Photographs of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Iran, 1849-93. Malibu: Undena, 1981. 32 Schwartz, Joan M. "Introduction" In Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, 8. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. 33 Calotychos, Vangelis. Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 52. 34 Panayotopoulos, Nikos. "On Greek Photography: Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece." Third Text 23, no. 2 (2009): 191.

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A typical Nelly image focuses on movement, form, shadows, symmetry, all of which aspire towards the noble ideals of classical Greece. They frequently recall, and run parallel to, Leni Riefenstahl’s aesthetic language of Nazi grandeur, forming what has been called a “transnational fascist aesthetic”.35 Her example demonstrates that local photographic production does not always constitute a staunchly oppositional locus to the Western gaze, and that the Greek national identity is largely informed and shaped by the view of Greece in the eyes of its Western European neighbours.36

fig.4: Nelly Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, Nikolska Dancing at the Acropolis (1929).

Panayotopoulos’ main argument is that Nelly ‘art-directed’ the image of Greece to coincide with that of the pre-established Western gaze, essentially portraying Greece how “a Philhellene traveller would”;37 the term ‘Philhellene’ refers to the Europeans who, inspired by their love of antiquity and romantic adventure, came to fight in the Greek War of Independence after 1821.38 Of the Philhellenes, C.M. Woodhouse writes: “they loved the Greece of their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!35 Katsari, Constantina. "Inter-War Ideology in Nelly’s’s Nudes: Nationalism, Fascism and the Classical Tradition." Journal of Modern Greek Studies, no 31 (2013): 2. 36 "Commodifying Classical Antiquity: Greek Photography and Archaeological Ruins." In Imaging History. Photography after the Fact, edited by Bruno Vandermeulen and Danny Veys, by Iro Katsaridou and Anastasia Kontogiorgi, Brussel: ASA Publishers, 2011. 41. 37 Panayotopoulos, "On Greek Photography", Third Text : 181-194. 38 Koliopoulos and Veremis, Greece, Greece: The Modern Sequel. London: Hurst, 2007. 45.

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dreams: the land, the language, the antiquities, but not the people”.39 The comparison therefore makes sense – after all, Nelly, like the Philhellenes, was interested in myth, not in reality.40 Mythologising the past is central to modern Greek identity and official Greek state discourses. Following the re-imagining of ancient Greece by Europeans, a process in which photography played a fundamental role, the rhetoric of the official Greek state also came to mirror a romantic perception of Greece’s Hellenic past. As we will see, it is used to unite the members of the “imagined community”41 of the nation, as well as in the form of a marketing tool to promote Greece abroad. The re-imagined ancient past confers prestige upon Greece’s present, and it is a myth that Greece likes to tell itself constantly.42 Following Panayotopoulos argument regarding the influence of the Western cultural hegemony in Greek photographic production in his article "On Greek Photography: Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece",43 this essay aims to interrogate the ways in which the Western gaze, and the imagery that it established in the early stages of photography, still dominate official state discourses in Greece, and how these translate into present-day domestic photographic production. My chronological focus is the 21st century – from 2000 to the present, as a time of instability and change in Greek economy and culture, and consequently, in Greek photography. The essay follows a linear perspective, and employs three case studies: 1) the Omonia 2000 series by Stratos Kalafatis, produced in the turn

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!39 Panayotopoulos, "On Greek Photography", Third Text : 188. 40 This is meant to be a modification of Susan Sontag’s famous critique of Leni Riefenstahl in her essay “Fascinating Fascism”. In it, Sontag writes: “Riefenstahl never mentions [any signs of modernity] since she cares only about myth, not history”. Nelly’s work was explicitly influenced by, and finds many parallels, in Riefenstahl’s work. From: Sontag, Susan. "Fascinating Fascism by Susan Sontag." New York Review of Books. Accessed February 1, 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/. 41 Anderson, Benedict R. O. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. and Extended ed. London: Verso, 1991. 42 Morales, Helen. "Introduction" In Classical Mythology a Very Short Introduction, 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 43 Panayotopoulos, "On Greek Photography", Third Text : 181-194.

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of the century as an account of the urban Greek landscape in a liminal moment of rapid modernisation and economic growth, 2) Gerasimos Domenikos’ Athens 2004 photographs, which capture the urban Greek reality at the climax of its desired ‘fully European’ image, and 3) Panos Kokkinias’ 2011 “Leave Your Myth in Greece” series, a parody on official state tourism discourses, produced in the times of crisis. Writing on Greek photography is, as Eleni Papargyriou has cleverly remarked, akin to writing in a “bibliographical vacuum”44 – theoretical discourse around photographic production in Greece is still quite limited, critical writing is remarkably sparse, while photography on its own right is still not regarded as an art of the same stature as painting or sculpture.45 The selection of these three photographic series was not arbitrary, but given this vacuum, all are thought to reflect the contemporaneous zeitgeist in many ways, therefore rendering each one a relevant framework to comment on Greek culture and politics. Part Two: Canonising a ‘post-classical’ photography: the “New Greek Photography”

Photographic practices following the restoration of democracy in 1974 (and thus of freedom of speech) in Greece emerged as the deliberate attempt to be distanced from the representational clichés devised by a photographer like Nelly. All things alluding to a glorious classical past were scorned upon in domestic photographic discourse, and an expression of resistance to the dominant narratives of Western cultural hegemony was observed. This resistance to hegemony entailed an alternative view of Greek society that challenged these highly fictional, albeit widely established representations, as co-opted by the ruling class, namely the Greek state. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!44 Papargyriou, Eleni. "Kostas Ioannidis, Contemporary Greek Photography: A Century in Thirty Years, Athens, Futura." Kaput Magazine. Accessed February 1, 2015. http://www.kaput.gr/gr/04/kostas-ioannidis-contemporary-greek-photography-a-century-in-thirty-years-athens-futura-2008/. 45 Petsini, Penelope. "Appropriative Strategies vs Modernist Orthodoxies: Postmodern Concepts in Contemporary Greek Photography." Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no 2 (2012): 227.

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The culmination of this attitude is perhaps found in “A Post-Classical Landscape: Greek Photography in the 1980s”, a photographic exhibition put on by the Hellenic Centre of Photography and curated by the Greek photographer, curator and critic John Stathatos, which toured the UK. This marked an effort to provide a canonic framework for the dissemination and analysis of Greek photography, which until then curiously lacked any sort of critical or academic grounding. To quote Stathatos in the exhibition catalogue’s opening essay:

“The photographers in question, irrespective of the wide range of styles employed, are all basically concerned with exploring facets of contemporary Greek society and culture; in other words, they are dealing with what, in America, came to be known as social landscape photography. At the same time, a conscious and deliberate effort has been made to escape […] visual conventions, […] whether classical landscape with columns or Tourist Board posters.” 46

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!46 Stathatos, John. A Post-classical landscape: Greek photography in the 1980s. Athens: Hellenic Centre of Photography, 1988. Non-paginated.

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fig.5: John Stathatos’ article on the “New Greek Photography” in The Independent’s Saturday magazine supplement (1988). .

Writing in 1988, Stathatos identifies the two most contrived representational motifs in regards to Greece, the archaeological site and the sun-drenched locale, the former perhaps being the advanced modern-day equivalent of the 19th-century photograph of the classical ruin. We see, then, that the idiom of the ancient temple carte-postale photograph persists well into the 1980s, over a century after European photographers first immortalized Athens’ sacred rocks. What Stathatos describes in the same essay as an emergent wave of “New Greek Photography” is thus a collective reaction to these archetypal representations of Greece in photography, which aimed to break free of the previous trend of emphasising origins at the expense of more recent events47 and move onto a “post-classical” terrain. One historical account of Greek photography traces the thematic predisposition of this movement: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!47 Leontis, Artemis. "Introduction." In Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. 27.

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“In the 1970s, the general photographic interest is exclusively turned towards the city and the urban experience. Native photographers are suggesting a new ‘post-classical’ landscape, influenced by social documentary photography.”48

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!48 Moschovi, Alexandra. "From the Representation of Politics to the Politics of Representation" In I Elliniki Fotografia Kai I Fotografia Stin Ellada (Greek Photography and Photography In Greece), edited by Iraklis Papaioannou. Athens: Nefeli, 2013. 167.

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Chapter One: Modernisation (2000) Charting the urban experience in the millennium: liminality and the loss of communality in Omonia 2000

Athens’ Omonia Square, historically a symbol of working-class struggle,49 appears as a recurring motif in Greek photography from the 1970s onwards. In order to interrogate this imagery, it is necessary to consider the square’s connotations within the popular culture. As it has been established in contemporary critical theory, the urban landscape is both a material and a discursive reality.50 As such, it is shaped by its tangible, geographical specificities, as well as by historical narratives and expectations. Omonia is indeed such a “hyper-place”51 loaded with narratives, which transcends reality and is deeply embedded in the collective social imaginary. The word Omonia (Ομόνοια, [oˈmonia]) is the word for harmony in the Greek language; the eponymous square, however, has been widely documented as encompassing everything but harmony – it is the unanimous informal belief of the Greek public that the square constitutes the utmost representation of contemporary national decay.52 The poet Nicolas Calas has written in “The Round Symphony” (1932): “All of Athens can be found in Omonia Square / and the most secret desires live there/ […] The square of every big city / Turns around madly / […] Omonia turns from too much wine / or too little food / and shows us its soulless life / the silence that inundates it / the silence that circles our existence / and dazzles us”.53

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!49 Noussia, Antonia, and Michal Lyons. "Inhabiting Spaces of Liminality: Migrants in Omonia, Athens." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 4 (2009): 603. 50 Rocamora, Agnes. Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media. London: I.B. Tauris ;, 2009. 3. 51 Vatopoulos, Nikos. "To Telma Tis Fantasias Stin Omonia (the End of Fantasy in Omonia)." I Kathimerini. January 3, 2015. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://www.kathimerini.gr/797841/article/politismos/polh/to-telma--ths-fantasias-sthn-omonoia. 52 Ibid. 53 Rentzou, Effie. "Stranger in the City: Self and Urban Space in the Work of Nicolas Calas." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26, no 2 (2008): 287.

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It becomes obvious that as a literary device, Omonia represents the culmination of all centrality and urbanisation, an emblem of a modern lifestyle in the newly established Athenian metropolis. As a place of incessant and motorised movement, Omonia captures “not only the swift circularity of modernity, but also its anonymous individualism and isolation”, comments the literary scholar Effie Rentzou.54 The square seems appropriate for capturing the rhythms of everyday life in the chaotic urban centre, and is promoted to the status of “a heraldic image of Athens”. 55 Omonia thus becomes a miniature of Athens, a place where all the city’s quintessence is condensed, and it could be argued that the square embodies a similar role within contemporary photography. On the other hand, the Parthenon, the favourite subject of 19th century photographers as outlined earlier, is painted by Calas as Omonia’s metaphorical antipode. It appears in another of his poems, “Acropolis” (1934), as the supreme symbol of power of the Greek state and the bourgeois pseudo-intellectual elite, and a banal signifier of a romantically re-imagined antiquity that has been exploited for mass tourism purposes;56 one that is wholly antithetical and irrelevant to the modern moment, as lived by the Athenian people. Calas, a revolutionary and a communist who wished to dismantle the bourgeois-led Athenian status quo,57 expresses the general collective feeling of disdain towards Europe’s historical appropriation of Greece as a topos of myth, as well as the Greek state’s recitation of this same rhetoric – a position that is also echoed in contemporary Greek photographic production.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!54 Rentzou, Effie. "Stranger in the City: Self and Urban Space in the Work of Nicolas Calas." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26, no 2 (2008): 288-290. 55 Ibid. 56 Giannakopoulou, Liana. "Perceptions Of The Parthenon In Modern Greek Poetry." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20, no. 2 (2002): 241-50. 57 Katsari, Constantina. "Inter-War Ideology in Nelly’s’s Nudes: Nationalism, Fascism and the Classical Tradition." Journal of Modern Greek Studies, no 31 (2013): 14.

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fig. 6: Untitled photograph from Omonia 1980, Andreas Belias (1980).

One of the first notable photographic albums of Omonia Square is the homonymous Omonia 198058 by Andreas Belias, published in black and white in 1980, alongside texts by Yorgos Ioannou. In a sense, this photographer portrays the Athenian counterparts of Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the flâneur.59 Belias’ Omonia Square is the inner-city setting that has embraced the traditionally marginalised: drug addicts, prostitutes, refugees and illegal immigrants, closeted homosexual men and transgender women are all the social “outcasts of modernity”60 who appear strolling (and ‘flirting’ with the photographer’s lens), as is the flâneur’s signature movement, through Omonia in this series. This work is considered to be the first exploration and survey of Omonia’s “sinful side”,61 a section of the Athenian ‘underbelly’ where semi-secret social performances occur, and which remained unbeknownst to the Athenian bourgeoisie prior to the book’s publication.62 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!58 Belias, Andreas, and Yorgos Ioannou. Omonia 1980. Kedros, 1987. 59 Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays. Edited by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1964. 60 Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity, 2004. 61 Kalafatis, Stratos, and Philippos Philippou. Omonia 2000: Taxidi Ston Omfalo Tis Athinas (Omonia 2000: Voyage to The Heart of Athens). Athens: Agra, 2000. Back-cover. 62 Anon., "Omonia 1980." OUGH! Accessed February 6, 2015. http://www.ough.gr/index.php?mod=articles&op=view&id=1092.

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Elsewhere, too, Omonia is shown as the microcosm that engulfs those that had previously been on the representational margins. Eleni Maligoura’s nocturnal series Omonia (1987) is thematically constructed in a similar way to Belias’ work in that it showcases those who stroll through or briefly linger around the square to ‘kill’ time. What differentiates Maligoura’s series from Euro-American articulations of the social documentary and street genres of photography is its rendering of urban space as communal, and not merely public,63 a trait associated with more traditional societies. Maligoura’s Omonia outlines the social ‘webs’ that are woven both between Omonia’s socially underrepresented subjects, but also between them and her, which renders this series “a documentation –of anthropological orientations– of space and faces”, as one recent authority offers.64

fig. 7: Untitled photograph from Omonia, Eleni Maligoura (1987).

These older works bring us to a more recent endeavour: Stratos Kalafatis’ Omonia 2000: Voyage to the Heart of Athens (2000) (henceforth Omonia 2000) photo book is somewhat of an unofficially titular sequel to Belias’ ‘cult’

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!63 Ioannidis, Kostas. "Photography of the Social Space." In Sinchroni Elliniki Fotografia: Enas Aionas se Trianta Chronia (Contemporary Greek Photography: A Century in Thirty Years), 191. Athens: Futura, 2008. 64 Ibid.

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Omonia 1980 volume. As an update on the original, it brings the happenings of the square to the contemporaneous moment, the turn of the 21st century – a time dominated by vast changes in the Athenian urban site, in the countdown to the 2004 Olympiad. The series makes use of an aesthetic idiom similar to the style of street photography first introduced by Robert Frank in his photo book The Americans (1958),65 a version of which is also used by Belias in his 1980 depiction of Omonia. Kalafatis, like Frank, documents the street, a location of the urban landscape that is central to contemporary photography. As the site where the ‘masses’ congregate, it functions symbolically as the platform where ‘real’ things happen – the stage of everyday occurrences. The very choice of Omonia as the location of Belias’, Maligoura’s, and Kalafatis’ works is not coincidental – the square, loaded with narratives, certainly plays the role of the ‘leading lady’ in all these series. As we saw from Calas’ poem, the Parthenon emerges as a reflection of the status quo, while Omonia, its polar opposite, reflects the quotidian reality of the Athenian community. Indeed, nothing monumental or epic happens in Kalafatis’ Omonia, which invariably depicts habitual, inconsequential moments, following Henri Lefebvre’s description of everyday life:

…everyday life comprises all that is humble, ordinary, and taken for granted; it is made up of repetitions, of small gestures and insignificant actions in which all the elements relate to each other in such a regular sequence of accepted patterns that their meaning need never be questioned.66

As is the case with The Americans, Kalafatis’ Omonia 2000 photographs are presented next to literary texts (in this case, by Philippos Philippou). The Americans is regarded as the first “apotheosis of the snapshot”67 within the art historical canon; a work that signaled a shift from formalism into compositions characterised by spontaneity and the absence of sentimentalism. Despite harsh early reviews, “Frank’s style has been adopted into our visual language”,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!65 Frank, Robert. The Americans. Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1978. 66 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 100-101. 67 Gefter, Philip. "Introduction" In Photography after Frank. New York: Aperture, 2009. 8.

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says the critic Philip Gefter.68 The pictures that comprise Omonia 2000 are indeed a good manifestation of how we have absorbed Frank’s influence into our contemporary vocabulary. The Omonia 2000 images are presented in a black-and-white square format, and are at times blurry, shaky or entirely unfocused - they are thus deliberately informal; stylistic attributes that intensify the chaotic atmosphere that permeates Omonia. To work in black-and-white today (or, similarly, in 2000), a time of affordable and ubiquitous colour photography equipment, is more of an aesthetic statement than a necessity. As a staple of documentary photography,69 the use of black and white photography here (the rest of Kalafatis’ work is otherwise dominated by brightly saturated colours)70 alludes to his referencing of works from the past; Omonia 2000 thus engages in an intertextual conversation with Belias’ Omonia 1980 and older milestones of documentary photography, such as Frank’s The Americans. All of Kalafatis’ images inside the volume present apparently unstaged moments – to use the terminology ascribed to Frank’s work, they are simple snapshots. Like Maligoura’s 1987 Omonia entity, these can initially be read as an anthropological query into the faces that parade around the square. Some subtleties within their context, however, suggest otherwise. In the Omonia 2000 photo book, there are as many texts, if not more, as there are images. As such, the words create a fixed “linguistic meaning” for the images, and the overall work’s meaning is thereon forged through their joint, dialectical co-existence.71 In skimming through the writing that accompanies the photographs, it is understood that they are not framed as ‘impartial’ portraits of Omonia. To cite an excerpt of one of Philippou’s texts from the book:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!68 Gefter, Philip. "Introduction" In Photography after Frank. New York: Aperture, 2009. 10. 69 Photography, a critical introduction p. 226 70 See for example: Kalafatis, Stratos. Journal: 1998-2002. Athens: Agra, 2004. 71 Di Bello, Patrizia. "Introduction" in The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and beyond, London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. 4.

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I frequently see the youth in Omonia. In the afternoons, they go to the frontistiria,72 crossing the junctions, descending on the escalators of the underground, side-stepping at times to go to the fast-food places. In the evenings, after ten, they are dismissed and head to the bus stops towards their remote neighborhoods. They keep their books in modern bags that fall on their backs. They do not hold them in hand, as it was common in older times. Strolling, they flirt, joke, make gestures, giggle, find themselves in a perpetual state of euphoria. Their parents, who had been deprived of so many, provide them with every possible facilitation. Besides the frontistiria, they also send them to gyms so that they can exercise, in order to keep their body in shape. Many girls attend music or ballet classes, not because they are inclined to music or ballet, but to be chic. Some hold a mobile phone in hand, the latest sign of prosperity and eudemonia.73

This particular chapter, entitled “Tribes of Youth”, reads, as do others in the book, like an aphorism towards a new generation of Greeks who were raised in postmodernity, harnessed by the perils of globalisation and the brand-new consumer culture that has taken over the previously ‘unspoiled’ Greece. The author, Philippou, is somewhat nostalgic for life in a pre-globalised world. Drawing on this framework, the pictures begin to unravel as indirect critiques of modern life under the economic, political, and cultural structures of ‘late capitalism’. An overall ‘anti-Westernisation’ feeling pervades the texts, and the photographs can be seen to mirror the views of the texts, in that they are skeptical of contemporary values and suggestive of omnipresent loneliness.

fig. 8: Omonia 2000 book cover, Stratos Kalafatis (2000).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!72 Note: “Frontistirio” (pl. frontistiria) is the Greek word for a particular kind of ‘cram school’ that is very common in Greece amongst high-school students who want to enter Greek universities. 73 Philippou, Philippos, and Stratos Kalafatis. "The Tribes of Youth." In Omonoia 2000: Taxidi Ston Omfalo Tis Athinas. Athens: Agra, 2000.

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fig. 9: a two-page spread from Omonia 2000, Stratos Kalafatis (2000).

We see, thus, a stylistic influence from the broader Western art historical canon, in the intertextual referencing of American social documentary photography, while there is noticeably an underlying mood of skepticism towards the values that a Westernised mode of living entails. A paradox in itself, which is nevertheless characteristic of a crypto-colonial society, as the scholarship tells us. According to Dimitris Plantzos, Greece, as a crypto-colony, is condemned to a state of inadequacy in the eyes of the West, which creates “a desire for the Western paradigm, as well as a marked antithesis to it”.74 This ultimately results in the usage of Western image-making paradigms to comment on the changes brought about by the very project of Westernisation – “the auteur is employing an aesthetics borrowed from [European modernism], […] to alleviate the discomforts this very modernity creates”.75

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!74 Plantzos, Dimitris. "Dead Archaeologists, Buried Gods" In Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.153. 75 Ibid. 157.

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Conversely, a recent migration study76 conducted in Omonia and its adjacent streets concluded that central to the experience of the square amongst immigrants is liminality, a term first used to describe life in transitional stages: liminal spaces are “moments of discontinuity in the social fabric, in social space and in history, when people are in transition from one stage of life to another”.77 This concept reflects the chaos and uncertainty that defines life in the inner-city spaces of major metropolitan centres and is palpable throughout the subjects seen in Omonia 2000. As Kalafatis’ Omonia highlights the impermanence and rootlessness of the modern social fabric, liminality proves as a key interpretative tool for its analysis. In beginning to view the images through its prism, we realise this notion becomes applicable both on a personal and a societal level. For one, all of Kalafatis’ subjects appear to be in a constant state of motion. In Omonia 2000, no-one lingers in the square. Everyone here is in passage, a passer-by onto the next stage of life, hence suspended in a liminal moment. If this book is anything to go by, the experience of life in the modern European metropolis is dictated by relentless movement, and echoing Calas’ “The Round Symphony”, this incessant movement seems to lead nowhere. Every subject is in a rush and no-one interacts with each other in these pictures, unlike in previous representations of Omonia, such as Belias’ 1980 series – not even the photographer with his subjects. All sense of communality, as it was present in Maligoura’s 1987 Omonia, is lost in 2000. Athenians no longer congregate in the urban setting, enamoured with the environment that surrounds them – the flâneur has now duly disappeared. As this tome deliberately references its predecessor, Omonia 1980, the statement that its creators are interested in conveying can be traced in the ways that this new iteration has been updated from the original. The overarching statement of Omonia 2000, it seems, is that the key component of life in the year 2000 is alienation and isolation.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!76 Noussia, Antonia, and Michal Lyons. "Inhabiting Spaces of Liminality: Migrants in Omonia, Athens." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 4 (2009): 601-624. 77 Shields, Rob. "Ritual Pleasures of a Seaside Resort" In Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, 83. London: Routledge, 1991.

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Unavoidably, this prompts the question – what changed between 1980 and 2000, in order to make the early 2000s such an unbearable, hostile time? Following its entry into the European Union, Greece experienced the highest growth rates in Europe in the late 1990s78 and the ensuing national ideology was formulated as follows:

The slogan on a ‘Strong Greece’ joined the ones on ‘growth/development’ and ‘modernization’, and all together found their materialization in the cityscape of Athens and beyond. The capital city during [the] late 1990s and 2000s saw the construction of the subway system, the new airport, the Attica Tollway, the suburban railway, the

tram, the new Acropolis Museum, Olympic facilities (which included among other new sports facilities an Olympic Village), and indeed shopping malls.79

In the turn of the century, the city of Athens was truly converted into a large construction site in anticipation of the 2004 Olympiad, the announcement of which had triggered a construction boom in the city. Taken from a high angle, a photograph in Omonia 2000 presents the newly built Athens metro (fig. 10) – the greatest of the new infrastructural projects and a feat synonymous with modernisation that was, amongst others, welcome to Greece with discourses of grandeur and glory, as per the prevailing millennium ideology of success and a “Strong Greece”. Next to the station are still visible the remnants of the construction work; we witness, then, this liminal state of in-betweenness – an urban landscape on the verge of complete transformation. Kalafatis takes a more critical stance towards this new stage of modernity, offering that it initiates a different relationship with the landscape, one defined by ubiquitous alienation. His stance appears to mirror what modernisation theorists have argued, that “economic development goes hand in hand with the adoption of individualist values, both at the national and at the personal level.”80

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!78 Dalakoglou, Dimitris. “The Crisis before "The Crisis": Violence and Neoliberalization in Athens”, Social Justice 39, vol. 1 (2012): 24. 79 Ibid. 26. 80 Inglehart, Ronald, and Wayne E. Baker. "Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values." American Sociological Review, vol. 65: 19.

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His Omonia 2000 is the melancholic documentation of a city in a transitionary stage of urbanisation, a rite of passage from a semi-traditional order to a ‘fully modern’ one. Liminality “presupposes significant changes in the dominant self-image”81 and this ongoing change is reflected in the pictures that comprise Omonia 2000, both in the architectural facets of the landscape and in the social relationships (or lack thereof) that encircle it.

fig. 10: Untitled photograph of the Athens metro from Omonia 2000, Stratos Kalafatis (2000). .

Liminality is dually discernible in Omonia 2000, as the subjects of the metropolis are in a constant motional whirlwind, and as the Athenian (and by extension, the Greek) society is assuredly moving ‘ahead’ – having shed its communal space (a residue of previous non-European eras and social structures that are now fittingly forgotten) in true metropolitan fashion, it is ascending into a bright, neoteric, non-‘Oriental’, ‘de-Balkanised’ future.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!81 Todorova, Maria. "Introduction" In Imagining the Balkans. Updated ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 18.

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Chapter Two: Utopia (2004) Tracing the 2004 Olympic dreamscape in the photographs of Gerasimos

Domenikos In 2004, four years after the publication of Kalafatis’ book, the Greek nation realised its long-standing dream of finally hosting the Summer Olympic Games, a landmark event and turning point in recent Greek history, for multiple reasons that will be examined here. The institution of the Olympic Games was revived in its modern form in 1896, and in recent times it has been understood as an opportunity to elevate a nation’s prestige.82 In Greece’s case, the 2004 Olympiad was seen as a unique opportunity for a deliberate ‘re-branding’ of modern Greek identity: in her opening speech, the president of the Athens Olympic Committee, Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki spoke of the “new Greece”83 she and her partners wanted to present to the world through the Games. This “new Greece” referred to the Committee’s central aim, which was to convince the international community of the country’s modernity and firm European status, in both cultural and economic terms, and amidst speculation in the Western press that Greece would not deliver the necessary infrastructure on time, to erase the common perception of modern Greeks as unworthy successors of their ancient ‘forefathers’. The Olympics, “key sites in the discursive construction of nation”,84 thus provided a rare occasion where Greece had the chance to represent itself internationally and communicate its self-image to the rest of the world – its uniquely dual identity of so-called ‘heir’ to classical Greece, and modern, developed country.85 This emphatic imperative to assert Greece’s pristine modernity while maintaining ties with the archaic past can be traced down to the chosen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!82 Traganou, Jilly. "National And Post-national Dynamics In The Olympic Design: The Case Of The Athens 2004 Olympic Games." Design Issues 34, vol. 2 (2010): 236. 83 Ibid. 240. 84 Hogan, Jackie. "Staging The Nation: Gendered and Ethnicized Discourses of National Identity in Olympic Opening Ceremonies." Journal of Sport & Social Issues 27, no. 2 (2003): 101. 85 Kitroeff, Alexander. Wrestling with the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics. New York: Greekworks.com, 2004. 18.

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Olympic mascots, two yellow dolls named “Phevos” and “Athena” that were modeled on 7th century BC dolls;86 as the official website of the Games informs us, “their names are linked to ancient Greece. And yet the two siblings are children of modern times. [...] Phevos is the name of the Olympian god of light and music, known as Apollo. Athena [is] goddess of wisdom and patron of the city of Athens”. Phevos and Athena are thus meant to symbolically represent the link between Greek history and the modern Olympiad.87 Once more shifting the focus to ancient Greece, Angelopoulou-Daskalaki spoke of a “unique Olympic homecoming”, as the Games had “finally” returned to their “birthplace”.88 “Welcome home” was naturally the slogan that was trumpeted throughout the two-week sporting spectacle. There was simply no way out of this homecoming discourse, as it physically manifested itself in the signage that adorned the Olympic Stadium and the adjacent Olympic Park at the time. (fig. 11)

fig. 11: Untitled, Gerasimos Domenikos (2004). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!86 Hamilakis, Yannis. The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 2. 87 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. "Giving Gifts (and Then Taking Them Back): Identity, Reciprocity and Symbolic Power in the Context of Athens 2004." Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 4 (2004): 501. 88 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. “The nation has two voices: Diforia and performativity in Athens 2004”, European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 435.

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The opening ceremony, as the phantasmagoric commencement that sets the tone of the event, is central to the Olympic discourse of national self-representation. Just like the official Olympic mascots and slogan, it was, unsurprisingly, greatly informed by Greece’s classical heritage. In a sequential narration of history that continued to the present, the ceremony evoked a linear continuity of Greek history from prehistory to the modern day.89 Cultural continuity, the ideology that modern Greeks are directly descended from the ancient Greeks, is a nation-building construct and a pillar of modern Greek identity,90 which dates back to the 19th century. It is relevant to state that this belief was first conceptualised in Western political centres, when colonial powers helped found the modern Greek nation,91 after the latter and its magnificent past were ‘re-discovered’ in the Western imaginations of the 19th century. Again, such performative re-enactments of the past draw on the infinite ‘back catalog’ of classical antiquity to convey a prestigious Greek present to a worldwide audience, as antiquity is the only ‘outstanding’ achievement worldwide audiences know of Greece. The Olympiad is, of course, not explicitly related to photography per se, but constitutes an interesting case study of the extent of Greece’s internalisation of Western classical archaeolatry (worship of antiquity),92 which has now become so systematised that it is the undisputed norm that the country wants to present on a world stage. The surrounding discourse of the Olympiad positions Greece as the ‘birthplace of Western civilisation’, and not as a vibrant current culture. The image of Greece is promoted as one of an ahistorical and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!89 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. "Giving Gifts (and Then Taking Them Back): Identity, Reciprocity and Symbolic Power in the Context of Athens 2004." Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 4 (2004): 502. 90 Kitroeff, Alexander. Wrestling with the Ancients: Modern Greek Identity and the Olympics. New York: Greekworks.com, 2004. 19. 91 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. “The nation has two voices: Diforia and performativity in Athens 2004”, European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 498. 92 Plantzos, Dimitris. "Dead Archaeologists, Buried Gods" In Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.149.

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atemporal entity, defined only by its distant past; the process of national self-colonisation, as outlined earlier through Nelly’s case, ensues. As we saw, in the creation of the Olympic mascots, slogan and opening ceremony, Greece performed itself, or an oversimplified version of itself (as is myth’s integral quality),93 for the Western gaze. The performance also extended into a ‘facelift’ of the Athenian urban landscape, parts of which were physically concealed to hide imperfections that would potentially disturb this gaze, such as the refugee tenements on the central Alexandras Avenue, where enormous photographic posters were employed to cover the façade of these ostracized buildings a few months prior to the Games.94 This act of concealing parts of people’s lived reality swiftly summarises the landscape’s transformation into an object of mass consumption. Amidst its pronouncement as an “unforgettable, dream Games”95 by the head of the International Olympic Committee, the Olympiad signaled a prolonged moment of national euphoria; for the first time, in an unforeseen display of nationalist sentiment previously foreign to Greece, the national flag became a fashionable symbol amongst its citizens, who started tattooing it on their cheeks and wearing it on t-shirts and other accessories.96 The gleaming spectacle of the 2004 Olympiad can then retrospectively be read as the symbolic crystallisation of Greece’s triumphant era of prosperity that commenced in the late 1990s, and constitutes a glamorous moment for a ‘thriving’ nation at the peak of its desired Westernised image.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!93 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Edited by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. 143. 94 Strigklogiannis, Stergios. Spaces of Common/Spaces of Hope: The Emerging Potential of Urban Commons in the Athens of Crisis. KU Leuven - Faculty of Engineering Science Department of Architecture, master thesis, 2014. 13. 95 "Rogge: Athens 'unforgettable, Dream Games'" ESPN.com. August 29, 2004. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer04/gen/news/story?id=1870458. 96 Hamilakis, Yannis. The Nation and Its Ruins Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 7.

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An event as crucial to the general Greek public as the Olympics was widely photographed like no other before it. Several Greek photographers of the time captured the visual transformation of the urban space; of all the photographic accounts of 2004, one of them singularly stands out for its evocation of Athens as a fleeting utopia. Previously published in a series of domestic weekly magazines and newspaper supplements of the time, Gerasimos Domenikos’ collection of photographs of Athens in the months leading to and during the 2004 Olympiad was recently re-published in the form of an anthology on the Greek webzine Popaganda.gr. Shown as a retrospective, this work is a contemplation on those distant times of ‘glittering’ prosperity, in which the air of ambiance and unison that invaded the city for a short while is distinctly palpable. We see through Domenikos’ lens that the Olympic spectacle remodeled the city, if only ephemerally, into a “dreamscape of visual consumption”.97 Athens emerges in Domenikos’ images as a clean and proper landscape – the infrastructure, newly built for the occasion, has just been premiered, and it seems as if a whole new “sparkling capital”98 has been unveiled for touristic mass consumption purposes. There is “a certain tautology between the ‘representations’ and reality”,99 as the city has been duly modified to “fit a promotional Olympic image” for the tourist gaze. The practice of contemporary tourism is similar to 19th century travel, in that it is based on the “pre-established reading of alien cultural signs”.100 As such, the tourist gaze can be seen as an evolution or subdivision of the original Western gaze that produced

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!97 Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 2002. 21. 98 Miller, Johnny W. "Tab for 2004 Summer Olympics Weighs Heavily on Greece." Wall Street Journal. May 11, 2005. Accessed February 9, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111577073122029888 99 "The City as Tourist Spectacle." In Virtual Globalization Virtual Spaces/tourist Spaces, edited by David Holmes, by Gordon Waitt. London: Routledge, 2001. 231. 100 Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. "Vision and Photography." In The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 178. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. "’Casting’ the Neohellenic ‘Other': Tourism, the Culture Industry, and Contemporary Orientalism in ‘Captain Corelli's Mandolin' (2001)." Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 3(2) (2003): 223.

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the first photographic renderings of Greece. One of the crypto-colony’s essential features is that it will go to great lengths to appeal to these gazes.

fig. 12: Untitled photograph of Omonia, Gerasimos Domenikos (2004).

According to Rodanthi Tzanelli, the nation has two voices – a domestic one that is used to address its members, and one that addresses “significant interlocutors” that authorise the nation’s identity in the world.101 Omonia 2000’s cacophony constitutes an image of introversion and intimacy, of “small gestures and insignificant actions”102 – of domestic life in the urban space when no significant interlocutors are watching. In stark contrast, the image of the Olympiad as outlined by Domenikos is characterised by outwardness – it employs the nation’s voice that addresses external audiences. Domenikos’ photographs are the traces of an official image constructed to appeal to the West, Greece’s significant interlocutor. In his portrayal of the 2004 Olympic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!101 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. “The nation has two voices: Diforia and performativity in Athens 2004”, European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 491. 102 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 100-101.

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scenery, even Omonia, previously the Athenian urban corner of squalor and deterioration, is sparkling symphonically with the rest of Athens. The square’s circularity no longer “shows us its soulless life” as it did in Nicolas Calas’ previously mentioned poem; Domenikos’ long exposures of Omonia’s lights re-construe the square’s temporality into that of a perpetual summer haven. The Olympiad’s transformative power transcends strictly architectural terms – the Games also instigated a change of ‘atmosphere’ in the city, as various contemporaneous accounts testify. The spectacle captured everyone’s imagination without exceptions - one Greek blogger who served as a volunteer wrote that the enthusiasm was so pervasive, that “it gave you the impression that you were somewhere else, not in the city you are used to”,103 while The Guardian testifies that “the Greeks still speak of 2004 as a defining moment, when the country crackled with optimism, confidence and pride”.104 Domenikos is documenting the sidelines of this all-important spectacle, and how it affects ordinary life in the city. In one photograph, the visiting audiences of the marathon race are occupying the freshly inaugurated public spaces in the city centre, under a purple August sky (fig. 13, 14, 15). Such an image of ethnic diversity and transnational unity, a relatively unfamiliar sight in the otherwise segregated Athens, succeeds in showcasing the sudden transformation of the city into a short-lived utopia. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has underlined the importance of discourse in the symbolic production of cultural products.105 Domenikos’ 2004 photographic output is of particular interest because of the different contexts it has appeared in, and the varying discourses it has been framed by. In its original context, printed on the glossy pages of assorted mainstream Greek

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!103 Georgakopoulos, Thodoris. "Ολυμπιακοί Αγώνες 2004: Ένα Φωτορομάντζο." Georgakopoulos.org. August 5, 2012. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://www.georgakopoulos.org/work/personal/athens2004/. 104 Smith, Helena. "Athens 2004 Olympics: What Happened after the Athletes Went Home?" The Guardian. May 9, 2012. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/may/09/athens-2004-olympics-athletes-home. 105 Rocamora, Agnes. Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media. London: I.B. Tauris ;, 2009. 56.

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magazines, the work is an invaluable record for the future archaeologists of postmodernity – a true relic of its time. Accompanied, in Bourdieu’s words, by the “celebratory discourse”106 of the contemporaneous press, it mirrors the contiguous state discourses of glory and European-ness. One spread in S magazine from the summer of 2004 presents the new Olympic infrastructural projects, under a headline that reads “Metropolitan Athens” (fig. 17) – a foremost expression of the 2004 zeitgeist. A headline of such fashion is, following the philosopher John Austin, a “performative utterance” – a statement that does not merely describe the given social reality, but also aims to change it.107 A mass media discourse (the discourse of “the so-called organs of public opinion”,108 to paraphrase Gramsci) couched in performativity serves to underline the new identity of a “Strong Greece” – ultra-modern, integrated, indeed a ‘force’ to be reckoned with. This is the voice of a society that likes to repeat to itself that it is indeed “metropolitan”, and thus European, until that becomes the accepted social reality by its members.

fig. 13, 14: Untitled, Gerasimos Domenikos (2004).

The recontextualisation of Domenikos’ work subverts these positions: while the Olympic spectacle might have captured the population’s imagination over its !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!106 Rocamora, Agnes. Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media. London: I.B. Tauris ;, 2009. 3. 107 Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. 5. 108 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited by Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 80.

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duration, the commonly held belief that emerges in everyday discourse is that hosting the event did Greece more bad than good in the grand scheme of things. The Olympics are rumoured to have cost Greece more than 10 billion euros, and are blamed by its citizens109 for the country’s descent into unmanageable debt, and ultimately, the current economic crisis. As such, removed from its original context and published on the popular Popaganda.gr commemoratively 10 years after the Games in the height of the Greek recession, the series can be seen as a poignant take on the ruthless optimism and conspicuous consumption that came to define the contemporaneous culture. The photographs henceforth gain new meaning, becoming an incisive and critical look into a monumental era of recent Greek history. This act of recontextualisation assumes a whole different discourse, and can be interpreted as a détournement of mainstream photojournalism, the Structuralist notion of appropriating “existing cultural fragments in such a way as to alter and invert their meaning”.110 This is a unique type of détournement, in which Domenikos’ own work functions as the intertext; he both speaks the aesthetic language of the time fluently, and subverts it at a later date. This détournement is tangible in technical terms, too. Comprised of analogue medium format compositions, at a time when digital photography had already been established as the norm for photo-reportage, this work rejects classifications between strictly defined fields of photographic production and high-low axiological dichotomies. As the photographer himself has commented, the use of medium format, a strong aesthetic signifier of ‘art photography’ that imposes a rigid square composition, was chosen for its subversive qualities – it provided a novel way of executing event photography, at a time when ‘society’ and sports events were usually shot using 35mm film

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!109 Smith, Helena. "Athens 2004 Olympics: What Happened after the Athletes Went Home?" The Guardian. May 9, 2012. Accessed February 4, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/may/09/athens-2004-olympics-athletes-home. 110 Hassler, Donald M. Political Science Fiction. Columbia, S.C: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 100.

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or by digital means.111 The resulting photographs do not belong to either the genre of ‘art photography’ or that of reportage, but are rather a hybrid of the two. The different possible levels of interpretation of Domenikos’ 2004 series arise in one of the pictures – a portrait of the aforementioned Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki (fig. 16), simultaneously the most emblematic figure of the 2004 Olympiad and a symbol of the bourgeois Athenian elite. From a semiological standpoint, this work can be interpreted in divergent ways depending on how its signified constituents are decoded by the viewer. On a denotative level, we see Angelopoulou-Daskalaki standing outside the Zappeion Megaro building at the National Garden of Athens in June of 2004, visibly beaming with joy for the upcoming August event. On the level of connotation however, and in the eyes of most Popaganda.gr readers, Angelopoulou-Daskalaki – the wife of a Greek billionaire presumably left untouched by the current endemic of crisis, condenses the now unpopular ideology of Olympic excess that drove the country to the edge of bankruptcy.

fig. 15: Untitled, Gerasimos Domenikos (2004).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111 Aggelidis, Dimitris. "Gerasimos Domenikos." Dimitris Aggelidis. June 23, 2011. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://dimitrisangelidis.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/blog-post_3691.html.

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fig. 16: Untitled portrait of Gianna Angelopoulou-Daskalaki, Gerasimos Domenikos (2004).

Her presence functions metonymically, as she can be seen to represent one of the crypto-colony’s integral traits – that of xenomania,112 the unfiltered, pathological affectation for all things Western, European, American, foreign, glamorous, modern. Her pearl necklace, a ‘WASP-y’ trope of American conservatism, illustrates this xenomanic infatuation with Euro-American cultural paradigms that reached its peak at the Olympic epoch amidst discourses of progress and Westernisation. Similarly, the neoclassical columns of the Zappeion that surround her underline, once again, the sacramental role of classical antiquity in the expression of a chic, prestigious, ‘European’ Greek identity. The pearls and the classical columns co-exist in equilibrium, as symbols of modernity and heritage, respectively. As the simultaneous peak of perceived national success and symbolic moment that catapulted Greece into crisis, the Olympiad photographs are subject to ambivalent readings. While Domenikos has not explicitly expressed his views !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!112 Plantzos, Dimitris. "Dead Archaeologists, Buried Gods" In Re-imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.148.

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in regards to his work’s recontextualisation, the images inevitably ‘wink’ at viewers who are remotely familiar with the current Greek culture; even though it is not plainly articulated, within the work are embedded anti-hegemonic notions against ideologies that privilege and prioritise a superficially glamorous image to be projected globally for the approval of Western eyes – by way of concealing parts of the diverse domestic reality (this is the nation’s external, performative voice) over the long-term self-sustainability and welfare of the Greek people (this, on the other hand, corresponds to the nation’s intimate, domestic voice).

fig. 17: Gerasimos Domenikos’ photograph in a spread in S Magazine (2004).

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Chapter Three: Crisis (2011) Thematologising the Greek economic crisis: “Leave Your Myth In Greece”

To understand the drastic changes that have occurred within the Greek social fabric over the past years, one needs to compare Domenikos’ previously examined images of the 2004 Olympiad with the viral images of the Olympic infrastructure of Athens ten years after the Games, which were circulated online in the English-speaking mass media in early 2014. Images of deserted, weed-ridden sports arenas and pools under various sensationalistic headlines such as “The new ruins of Athens: Rusting and decaying 10 years on, how Greece's Olympics turned into a £7 BILLION white elephant”113 concretise the image of Greece in the popular Western imagination – an image of decay and perpetual decline. A sense of destruction, abdication, dirt and dereliction runs through the images – the formerly utopian landscape of “Welcome home”, “Metropolitan Athens”, and “the New Greece” has naturally ‘decomposed’, providing henceforth a juicy metaphor for the global media to exploit (while at the same time managing to reinforce the ‘ruin’ as Greece’s quintessence). ‘Prosperity-era’ Greece has no visual correspondence with Greece’s dystopian present, and there is no better image than that of the dazzling Olympiad to contrast the two eras of recent national history to dramatic effect.

The effects of the crisis have also necessarily problematised Greek artists – the thematisation of the ongoing Greek crisis has become a ‘trending topic’ amongst Greek curatorial circles, both in the domestic sphere as well as abroad. Besides the recent “Depression Era”, a photography show held at the Benaki Museum in Athens in late 2014, another group exhibition was held at the Centre for Fine Art in Brussels entitled “No Country for Young Men: Contemporary Art from Greece in the Times of Crisis”, and showcased work

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!113 Evans, Sophie Jane. "The New Ruins of Athens: Rusting and Decaying 10 Years On, How Greece's Olympics Turned into a £7 BILLION White Elephant" Mail Online. August 13, 2014. Accessed February 3, 2015. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2723515/Athens-Olympics-leave-mixed-legacy-10-years-later.html.

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from all fields of the contemporary art scene in Greece. This exhibition’s conceptual core was centred on reversing the patronising and sensationalistic narratives reinforced by the foreign press concerning the Greek crisis, as seen in the previous headline. Panos Kokkinias’ photographic series “Leave Your Myth in Greece” is one of the noteworthy examples of work showcased there. Having emerged in the 1990s as the member of a generation of Greek photographers who readily incorporated postmodern concepts and forms into their practice,114 Panos Kokkinias’ “Leave Your Myth in Greece” series offers a reflection on contemporary Greek society and politics that is distinctly postmodern. As Penelope Petsini has stated, the series is a parody115 –a mode of appropriation that is central to discourses of postmodernism– of stereotypical representations of Greece found in Greek tourism campaigns. Using the pre-established tropes and clichés of promotional tourism imagery – one of the defining visual perceptions of Greece in the global imagination, Kokkinias delivers a poignant critique of a fragile nation on the brink of financial collapse, in the form of a “postmodern pastiche”.116 Central to this critique is a twist on the infamous “Live Your Myth in Greece” tourism slogan, which was launched by the Greek National Tourism Organization as part of its 2005 worldwide promotional campaign. The campaign made use of the quintessential high-colour, glossy imagery of desire that has come to define advertising photography.117 The heavily post-processed photographs that comprised this campaign brought idyllic leisure scenes together with vaguely mythological elements – juxtaposing, for example, the most widespread clichés of Greek tourism such as ancient temples and breathtaking beaches together with mermaids and winged Olympian gods (fig. 18). Predictably, all contemporary cultural signs that do

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!114 Petsini, Penelope. "Appropriative Strategies vs Modernist Orthodoxies: Postmodern Concepts in Contemporary Greek Photography." Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no 2 (2012): 235. 115 Ibid. 237 116 Ibid. 117 Wells, Liz. Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1997. 226.

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not adhere to narratives of modern holiday luxury (such as swimming pools overlooking the Aegean Sea, for one) are erased in this fairytale rendition of the Greek landscape. As Fredric Jameson would have it, “’pastness’ is conveyed by the glossy qualities of the image”118 here, in an abstract articulation of a hazy mythical history. Though perhaps lovely compositions under different contexts, these images are not unproblematic when used to promote a country’s overall image abroad, as they single-handedly open the door to further stereotypical reductions of the Greek social landscape.

fig. 18: “Live Your Myth In Greece” promotional poster, GNTO (2005).

Instantly graspable by a Greek public that is profoundly familiar with this ubiquitous catchphrase (as tourism forms the largest sector of the country’s economy), Kokkinias’ modification of the campaign’s motto from ‘live’ to ‘leave’ is meant to undermine the representational paradigm of ‘mythical Greece’ that the Greek state is so intent on perpetuating to entice visitors to its holiday destinations. What is witnessed, then, in Kokkinias’ work, produced in a time of asphyxiating budget cuts and great civil unrest, is a subversion of the official state rhetoric and its associated picture-perfect representations of Greece.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!118 Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review, July/August 1984. http://newleftreview.org/I/146/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism (accessed February 1, 2015)

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First exhibited in 2011, “Leave Your Myth in Greece” finds Greece in a climate of economic and social crisis. Its use of parody revolves around mocking archetypal behaviours that were prevalent in Greece prior to the advent of the crisis, as well as current nationalist political formations which emerged as an ugly side-effect of the draconian austerity measures. In Kokkinias’ works, such nationalist signs are rendered decayed and useless. For instance, Yiorgis (2011) (fig. 19) shows a man clad as a tsolias, a member of the Presidential Guard and an emblem of the Greek War of Independence, which has however been co-opted by nationalists and is mostly considered kitsch today.119 The tsolias and its adjacent ideologies of nationalism appear to be floating alone in a sea of infinite turquoise – the visual subtexts are, as is the sea in the picture, endless. Although the human figure in Kokkinias’ compositions tends to be placed far from the photographic lens – often located in the centre of the photograph while surrounded by a vast landscape, his work is, as it has been noted, “clearly anthropocentric”.120 Despite occupying a small space within Kokkinias’ grand frame, the tsolias is central to this image’s multiple connoted meanings, indeed attesting to the work’s anthropocentricity. Remove the figure of the tsolias from this composition and all that remains is a lush landscape, one that would not seem out of place had it served as the background in a commercial “Live Your Myth in Greece” poster. In that sense, the tsolias in this picture exists to inhabit this otherwise banal example of tourism iconography. Lost in a (literal) sea of tourism signifiers, the human figure is drowning, thus representing the tension between an idealised Greek landscape intended for tourist consumption and Greece as a ‘real’, inhabited place ‘plagued’ by crisis. The tsolias’ disruption of the harmonious Greek landscape metaphorically disrupts the idealised notions of Greece that the official state rhetoric has

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!119 Petsini, Penelope. "Appropriative Strategies vs Modernist Orthodoxies: Postmodern Concepts in Contemporary Greek Photography." Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no 2 (2012): 239. 120 Moschovi, Alexandra. "“The Burden of Self-consciousness”, Athensartreview No13, June’07." Panos Kokkinias. Accessed February 1, 2015. http://www.panos-kokkinias.com/texts/5moschovi-athensartreview.html.

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established. The fact that the tsolias is also a decadent nationalistic symbol adds the extra dimension of the overall rejection of nationalist ideologies. In a recent documentary, Kokkinias showcases his technique of digitally stitching together multiple photographs in order to enhance landscape compositions to spectacular effect.121 In Yiorgis (2011), this technique comes to life in the vast stretches of sea that surround the central figure of the tsolias, and which embody metaphorical qualities. The iconic image of the Aegean sea as the textbook articulation of ‘Greekness’ takes on a more macabre meaning here, appearing to symbolise the abyss of the bottomless recession.

fig. 19: Yiorgis, Panos Kokkinias (2011).

Next, in Arkadia (2011) (fig. 20), a formally dressed man is seen conversing on his mobile phone while puffing on a Cuban cigar; this photograph references an image that has been pre-established in the eyes of its audience – the archetypal figure of the staunch capitalist, the stock exchange businessman. His figure is reflective of the euphoric time period before the crisis spread across all strata of Greek society; as the press commented on this image, we see a textbook “suited-up Greek, who came in his car ‘to seal a business

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!121 De Lauwer, Willy. Panos Kokkinias, De Canvasconnectie 23/03 20:30u, online video. Accessed February 1, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag-BQpfs_I0

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deal’”,122 a character representative of the common social behaviours and attitudes before the ‘bubble’ of the continuously growing economy burst, when conspicuous consumption was the norm – hence the cigar and the four-wheel drive, both unmistakable symbols of a prestigious and powerful individual securely positioned in a world-class economy. The man’s tailored suit, the uniform of the banker and the politician, operates metaphorically as an emblem of neoliberalism, the system that is widely believed to have created the current conditions of debt. The man wearing it is then elevated to the global face of Greek corruption – the target of public distrust and widespread urban protest. As such, this photograph can be seen to outline the collective feeling of indignation towards the asphyxiating measures of austerity, the ones that led the philosopher Slavoj Žižek to call Greece the European testing ground for “a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy”.123 The image’s central character is emblematic of this total ‘demolition’ of democracy and characteristic lack of transparency that governs the crisis-ridden Greek political scene.

Taken inside an archaeological site in the Greek region of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, a landscape that has also been re-imagined and idealised in European painting since the Renaissance, this photograph is underpinned by a pervasive element of absurdity. Scattered amongst the Arcadian ruins is the businessman’s SUV ride, while in the background we see an industrial factory complex.124 This juxtaposition of both ancient and modern signs unavoidably invokes the central role of antiquity in the forging of modern Greek identity, as propagated by the aforementioned Greeks myths of cultural and national

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!122 Bistika, Eleni. "Panos Kokkinias: “Leave Your Myth in Greece» or, the Greek, the landscape and the utopia of myth” I Kathimerini. October 11, 2011. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://www.kathimerini.gr/727267/opinion/epikairothta/arxeio-monimes-sthles/panos-kokkinias-leave-your-myth-in-greece-h-o-ellhnas-to-topio-kai-h-oytopia-toy-opoioy-my8oy--egkainia-apoye-sthn-xippas-gallery. 123 Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. "The Ambivalence of Anti-Austerity Indignation in Greece." History and Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2014): 488-506. 124 Petsini, Penelope. "Appropriative Strategies vs Modernist Orthodoxies: Postmodern Concepts in Contemporary Greek Photography." Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 3, no 2 (2012): 237.

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continuity, as well as the average Greek citizen’s attempts to make sense of the materialities and ideologies that come together with these antiquities. The absurdity of the Arkadia scene and of the overall series is reflective, according to Kokkinias, of the ubiquitous uncertainty that the Greek public faced against the rampant life changes imposed by austerity. Hoping to motivate his fellow citizens “to be more self-critical”125 and by extension, more politically active against a tiny ruling Greek elite, Kokkinias is conversing with previous archetypal paradigms of national photographic representation to address the concerns of a society in disconcert, in effect provincialising those paradigms and reducing them in a similar mode they normally reduce the diverse lived reality. He thus paints an image of Greek society that parodies the myths that disguise the realities of protest and indignation, which constitutes this work an ideological critique of Greek society and culture. When “No Country for Young Men” was not funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture, Kokkinias said that “they want to show the good façade of things”.126 This statement illustrates the work’s precise ideological core, and how his version of the Greek reality is contrary to official state discourses, and thus, in an indirect but commanding way, challenges authority.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!125 Papadimitriou, Jannis. "Is the Financial Crisis Something to Laugh About?" Deutsche Welle. March 21, 2012. Accessed February 1, 2015. http://www.dw.de/is-the-financial-crisis-something-to-laugh-about/a-15825357. 126 De Lauwer, Willy. Panos Kokkinias, De Canvasconnectie 23/03 20:30u, online video. Accessed February 1, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag-BQpfs_I0

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fig. 20: Arkadia, Panos Kokkinias (2011).

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Conclusion Counter-hegemonic narratives in the end of history

If one thing has defined modern Greece since its inception, it is its economically and culturally subordinate position to the countries of the West, at once their internal Balkan Other and their spiritual ancestor. Many scholars would agree that Greece and the West have engaged in a crypto-colonial relationship, as the country has always been under the latter’s ‘sphere of influence’, a widely used euphemism for economic and cultural dependence.127 Further than that, from its juvenile stages, the medium of photography has been central to the ‘narration’ of the Greek nation. As purveyors of dominant ideologies, the early photographic representations of Greece in the 19th century were characterised by the constructs of the Western cultural hegemony, which established the country’s archetypal representations – the archaeological site and the sun-drenched seaside locale, both of which persist to this day. As we have seen from examples such as the 2004 Olympiad and tourism campaigns, the official Greek state has fully internalised these hegemonic constructs, valorising “endurance and continuity in its representation, rather than change”,128 while it seeks approval from the West, its significant interlocutor. Countering this, through the use of diverse techniques and themes, contemporary local photographers frequently question and re-write these narratives, creating an image of Greece that is decisively contrary to official state rhetoric. Following Gramsci, this resistance to dominant discourses constitutes a counter-hegemony, a “new way of conceiving the world” and of “modifying […] popular thought”.129

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!127 Herzfeld, Michael. "The Absence Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism." The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 900-903. 128 Traganou, Jilly. "National And Post-national Dynamics In The Olympic Design: The Case Of The Athens 2004 Olympic Games." Design Issues 34, vol. 2 (2010): 247. 129 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited by Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. 417.

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The 21st century, as we have seen it so far, has been significant for Greece, as the nation went full circle from being viewed as a promising first-world country (“a strong Greece” with the highest rates of economic growth in Europe) to Europe’s politically marginalised “pariah”.130 Initially a period of triumphant transformation in the cityscape, the 2000s came to an abrupt close in light of a disparaging economic crisis. This changing relationship with the West is reflected in the work of practitioners of photography in Greece in the different sections of this essay, as the fluctuating cultural economies largely dictate how the respective photographic representations are thematically constructed. Situated firmly in the inner-city heart of Athens, Omonia, the ‘people’s square’,131 is the quintessential symbolic topos of all that is ‘real’, of life as it is actually lived, and not as it is speculatively imagined by ‘outsiders’ – it thus represents the “back regions”132 of public performance in the city. Set against the backdrop of aggressive expansion, infrastructural construction and modernisation, Stratos Kalafatis’ Omonia 2000 is a blunt documentation of a semi-traditional world briefly suspended in a liminal stage, quickly disappearing to meet Western ideals. Subsequently, Gerasimos Domenikos’ photographic anthology of the 2004 Olympiad records this new, fresh, and exciting European country that has just been unveiled and premiered for the tourist gaze, unquestionably a ‘sub-genre’ of the Western gaze, whose shadow has been unwaveringly cast over Greece; this is Greece at its most monumental moment in recent memory. The themes of Greek photography have since shifted, responding to the changing economic realities. The social structures that were re-arranged in light of the crisis have in turn reframed the work created by Greek photographers, forcing more introspective and increasingly self-critical narratives that directly comment on regional specificities and events. The resulting works are “seismographs of their !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!130 Herzfeld, Michael. "The Absence Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism." The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 903. 131 Noussia, Antonia, and Michal Lyons. "Inhabiting Spaces of Liminality: Migrants in Omonia, Athens." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 4 (2009): 603. 132 Tzanelli, Rodanthi. "’Casting’ the Neohellenic ‘Other': Tourism, the Culture Industry, and Contemporary Orientalism in ‘Captain Corelli's Mandolin' (2001)." Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 3(2) (2003): 232.

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times”,133 and Kokkinias’ “Leave Your Myth In Greece” (whose previous work, as he says, did not “have a political undertone”)134 is a pertinent example of the new themes nourished by the crisis. In the times of postmodernity and the city as tourist spectacle (“with image, illusion and fantasy given priority over substance, ‘reality’, and the authentic”),135 when, as Guy Debord has written, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles”,136 the use of postmodern strategies was inevitably incorporated as a kind of second language into the work of Greek photographers. All three photographers respectively make use of the postmodern idioms of intertextuality, recontextualisation, and parody, respectively, largely quoting other works intertextually, in order to question the previous paradigms of national representation. Through the use of these postmodern modes of creation, they “construct meaning by reassembling and reappropriating pieces from the past, thereby adopting a dialectical stance towards history”.137 In doing so, they interrogate how “Western thought has dictated our ways of seeing”,138 and by extension, photographing the world. These photographic endeavours are agents of critical discourses, and in one way or another in opposition to dominant hegemonic orders. In the present self-‘curated’ stage of communications and social media, an age of obsessive photographic self-representation, initiating a familiarisation with the concept of cultural hegemony is now perhaps more timely and relevant than ever. In the face of an abundant flow of disposable imagery, attempting to learn how to decode the implicit dominant ideologies contained within the images that surround and ultimately shape us is increasingly vital. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!133 Dujardin, Paul. No Country for Young Men: Contemporary Greek Art in times of Crisis, Exhibition Catalogue. Brussels: BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, 2012. 7. 134 Ibid. 135 "The City as Tourist Spectacle." In Virtual Globalization Virtual Spaces/tourist Spaces, edited by David Holmes, by Gordon Waitt. London: Routledge, 2001. 220. 136 Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1. 137 Hoesterey, Ingeborg. "Pastiche in the Visual Arts." In Pastiche: Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, 25. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 138 Ibid.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Francis Frith, The Parthenon, Athens (1850-19870). From: "The Parthenon. Athens."

Victoria and Albert Museum. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O214413/the-parthenon-athens-photograph-francis-frith/.

2. Francis Frith, Victory Temple of Athens (1850-1870). From: "Athens Temple of Victory." Victoria and Albert Museum. Accessed February 15, 2015. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O214416/athens-temple-of-victory-photograph-francis-frith/.

3. 19th photograph of Athens. From: Chevedden, Paul E. Photographic Heritage of The Middle East: Exhibition of Early Photographs of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece and Iran, 1849-93. Malibu: Undena, 1981.

4. Nelly Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, Nikolska Dancing at the Acropolis (1929). From: Panayotopoulos, Nikos. "On Greek Photography: Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece." Third Text 23, no. 2 (2009): 181-194.

5. John Stathatos, article on the “New Greek Photography” in The Independent’s Saturday magazine supplement (1988). From: Academia.edu, John Stathatos

6. Andreas Belias, untitled photograph (1980). From: Belias, Andreas, and Yorgos Ioannou. Omonia 1980. Kedros, 1987. 35.

7. Eleni Maligoura, untitled photograph from Omonia (1987). From: Ioannidis, Kostas. "Photography of the Social Space." In Sinchroni Elliniki Fotografia: Enas Aionas se Trianta Chronia (Contemporary Greek Photography: A Century in Thirty Years), 191. Athens: Futura, 2008.

8. Stratos Kalafatis. Omonia 2000 book cover. From: Kalafatis, Stratos, and Philippos Philippou. Omonia 2000: Taxidi Ston Omfalo Tis Athinas (Omonia 2000: Voyage to The Heart of Athens). Athens: Agra, 2000. Back-cover.

9. Stratos Kalafatis, two-page spread from Omonia 2000 . From: From: Kalafatis, Stratos, and Philippos Philippou. Omonia 2000: Taxidi Ston Omfalo Tis Athinas (Omonia 2000: Voyage to The Heart of Athens). Athens: Agra, 2000. 57.

10. Stratos Kalafatis, untitled photograph of the Athens metro from Omonia 2000. From: From: Kalafatis, Stratos, and Philippos Philippou. Omonia 2000: Taxidi Ston Omfalo Tis Athinas (Omonia 2000: Voyage to The Heart of Athens). Athens: Agra, 2000. 33.

11. Gerasimos Domenikos, untitled (2004). From: "Ολυμπιακοί 2004: Ζώντας στην Αθήνα εκείνο τον Αύγουστο (Olympics 2004: Living in Athens That August)." POPAGANDA. Accessed February 1, 2015. http://popaganda.gr/olimpiaki-2004-

zontas-stin-athina-ekino-ton-avgousto/. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid.

57

14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Gerasimos Domenikos, two-page spread from S Magazine (2004). From: "Gerasimos

Domenikos." Flickr. Accessed February 1, 2015. https://www.flickr.com/photos/113594317@N03/page1/.

18. “Live Your Myth In Greece” promotional poster, GNTO (2005). From: ""Live Your Myth in Greece" for Greece National Tourism Organisation (by McCann Erickson)." AdForum.com. Accessed February 12, 2015. http://uk.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/6685523.

19. Panos Kokkinias, Yiorgis (2011): From: "Leave Your Myth In Greece." Panos Kokkinias. Accessed February 13, 2015. http://www.panos-

kokkinias.com/images/leave-your-myth-in-greece/index/myth-in-greece-index.html. 20. Panos Kokkinias, Arkadia (2011): From: "Leave Your Myth In Greece." Panos

Kokkinias. Accessed February 13, 2015. http://www.panos-kokkinias.com/images/leave-your-myth-in-greece/index/myth-in-greece-index.html.