Where does a photograph end? What intervenes from the moment
a series of pictures is taken until the moment it is printed? What happens
in a photographer's darkroom?
The Meta-photographs try to answer these kinds of questions. As their title suggests, they are photographs that derive from other photographs, in other words "extensions" of an original photograph which, as it is printed, slowly changes form. These are not just "pictures taken" but also "pictures constructed", pictures that reflect the darkroom process of analogue photography, thus claiming freedom and plasticity for the medium of photography itself.
As Gerhard Richter writes, “a photograph is like a small painting, but it is not one. This property leads you to attempt to convert it into a tableau”. Undoubtedly, in these Meta-photographs, the main catalyst is the super-ego of painting, which pushes the photographer to overcome the limits of his medium, to describe as accurately as possible the “here-now” of the subject, the “me-here-now” of the artist’s body as he develops the films and then prints them, changing times and diaphragms on the enlarger, cutting test strips, washing the prints and then letting them dry on the darkroom tiles.
So the Meta-photographs, beyond their main subject - the urban landscape - explore simultaneously the truth of photography itself (what does it mean to photograph, to develop, to print?) which tends to disappear under the constant expansion of digital photography. At the same time they attempt to depict the photographer's truth, his thoughts, his motions, his presence behind the camera and the enlarger, as he struggles with his medium.
— Panayotis Papadimitropoulos
The Meta-photographs try to answer these kinds of questions. As their title suggests, they are photographs that derive from other photographs, in other words "extensions" of an original photograph which, as it is printed, slowly changes form. These are not just "pictures taken" but also "pictures constructed", pictures that reflect the darkroom process of analogue photography, thus claiming freedom and plasticity for the medium of photography itself.
As Gerhard Richter writes, “a photograph is like a small painting, but it is not one. This property leads you to attempt to convert it into a tableau”. Undoubtedly, in these Meta-photographs, the main catalyst is the super-ego of painting, which pushes the photographer to overcome the limits of his medium, to describe as accurately as possible the “here-now” of the subject, the “me-here-now” of the artist’s body as he develops the films and then prints them, changing times and diaphragms on the enlarger, cutting test strips, washing the prints and then letting them dry on the darkroom tiles.
So the Meta-photographs, beyond their main subject - the urban landscape - explore simultaneously the truth of photography itself (what does it mean to photograph, to develop, to print?) which tends to disappear under the constant expansion of digital photography. At the same time they attempt to depict the photographer's truth, his thoughts, his motions, his presence behind the camera and the enlarger, as he struggles with his medium.
— Panayotis Papadimitropoulos
