Few people believed that such a book could come into being. Simply because Athens is not a beautiful city. Traffic, noise, pollution, billboards, buildings whose exteriors are stained with negligence and decades of smog. But through the photographs of Vassilis Makris and words of Nikos Vatopoulos in Facing Athens: the Facades of a Capital City (Potamos, 2003) anyone who thinks Athens lacks beauty is in for a change of mind.
Published in Greek in 2002, the book’s first edition has already sold out. The recent publication of the English version comes with plans for an exhibition of selected images at the Benaki Museum and international distribution following the Frankfurt Fair.
Vassilis Makris sips on a cup of tea at the Grande Bretagne hotel in the heart of his beloved city.
“If the book was a movie,” he explains, “Nikos Vatopoulos would be the writer and director, and I the cinematographer.” Vatopoulos, an architecture critic for the Greek daily Kathimerini, came up with the idea in but could not find the right photographer for the job. Until he came across Makris’ work.
“I didn’t know Vassilis,” Vatopoulos says. “But I came across a photograph that he had taken of a building that I was very familiar with. I was amazed at what he had caught with his eye and captured with the camera.” Ever since then, Vatopoulos had kept Makris in the back of his mind and when the time came to secure a photographer, he contacted him.
“When I saw more of his work, I immediately knew that I had made the right choice,” he says. The rest is history.
After narrowing the subject matter down to residential buildings in the municipality of Athens, the pair spent close to two years walking the streets, often melting under the scorching summer sun, waiting for the appropriate light, searching for the right angle. The book is chronologically divided into chapters, following architectural movements of the 20th century with an introduction to each. Many shots are taken from a low angle, leaving the viewer with a feeling of overwhelming grandiosity as beautiful balconies, details, doors, and buildings emerge from each page.
Athens is not an easy city to photograph. A beautiful building will often be overshadowed by a number of surrounding decrepit structures. An impressive door is blocked by garbage cans, motorbikes, or trucks unloading merchandise. As a result, Makris photographed some of the houses from angles that we would not normally see them from and through lenses that the human eye does not possess. To overcome other obstacles, physical labor was required. For instance, to photograph a marble entrance of one building, they removed an ugly, old doormat only to find various forms of debris and garbage beneath.
“We cut branches off a nearby tree and swept,” Makris recalls.
And as an unwritten rule goes, the more sweat and effort you put into something, the more satisfaction you feel with the result. Makris was initially extremely enthused with Vatopoulos’ idea and now feels enriched as a person and a photographer because he has contributed to making the residents of Athens finally see their city. To walk the streets and look up, to see beauty where it would not normally be seen.
“No matter what,” he says, “I will find something beautiful in a person, place, home, building. I look everywhere for it and single it out.”
About a decade ago, Makris was on assignment in Alexandria, Egypt working on a similar idea for Elle Decoration.
“Alexandria was in total decadence, yet it sparked with flashes of beauty, like an aging woman that wears a little lipstick on a wrinkled, yet beautiful mouth.”
Why the comparison to a woman, I ask, recalling the impressive and elaborate introduction to Facing Athens, where again he compares his perverse relationship with Athens to one with a woman.
“Because woman is the inspiration, the passion behind my work. She does it all.”
Makris has another book on his resume: Under the Sun: Design for Greek Living (Potamos, 2002). The book was a collection of photographs that he had taken for Elle Decoration, which after its publication were exhibited at the Zouboulakis gallery in Athens.
“For a photograph to be art it does not have to be a black and white shot of an old man sleeping on a bus,” Makris says. “Photography that illustrates articles, provides information, exudes feelings, has a commercial purpose, is for me, the most useful form that exists. Never have I shot a picture that has no purpose for being. Never. Never.”
Makris lives and works in Athens, prefers not to drive, loves to walk, and would not change his lifestyle at any price.
But Athens? Traffic, pollution, noise?
“Yes,” he says. “Athens, traffic, pollution, noise; life.” |
