Greek Islands

The photos in this series come from my open project started in 2012 on the lifestyle of the Greek people in Dodecanese islands, mostly on Leros island. I have self-published three books on this theme, and it is still a source of inspiration for me when I live in that area of the world. It is a life around the sea in these photos, because they were taken in the summer. Arriving on the Leros island was for me, coming from Italian Magna Graecia, like returning to my native land, and this strong impression led me to the self publication of my first photobook: "The gaze of Ulysses in Leros", dedicated to Anghelopoulos. About this work the italian writer Erri De Luca wrote: "He knows people who have inhabited the penitentiary archipelago, because to the public authorities the islands seemed to be equipped with additional fencing. For public authorities the waves are barbed wire. Therefore they filled Asinara, Favignana, Elba, Gorgona, Pianosa, Procida and in the Adriatic the infamous Goli Otok with bars. On my childhood island, Ischia, at the end of the season we visited the Aragonese Castle, home to Bourbon monasteries and prisons. The islands are legendary. Everyone has one planted in a memory, a nightmare, a desire. I landed in Leros, I swam in his sea, I devoured his squid, I swallowed his sunsets from my eyes. I leaf through the reticent album of an island lover. Reticent because he sticks to black and white, as if we foreigners were not entitled to witness the colors. I think I agree. After all, someone who writes stories in a notebook reduces them to a black-on-white draft. The men and women of these images inhabit their place without enchantment, stuck hot inside the ring of beauty, which is not powder, paint, flicker. Beauty is substance, strength and adventure of waves. Here the residents are surrounded by the element that is the majority of the planet. Therefore the island, and not the mainland, is in the image and likeness of the world. For us in the Mediterranean, ports are more necessary than stations. The images in this collection are taken by snatch, without any pose.. In this gallery of shots there is the restrained impulse of admiration, which does not allow itself the emphasis, the inappropriate approach. Of so much civilization and history that ended up in poems and tragedies recited on all the stages of the world, the seriousness of a reproach to the past remains in the faces. I glimpse their worry at being grandchildren of spendthrift ancestors who left a splendor of ruins, after having squandered divinities and Olympians and after having had their vocabulary plundered by all the languages of the world. Out of spite, they call their tram a metaphor and any exit: exodos. From these descendants of the solemn mythological revelries the photographer steals, together with the image, the shadow, which is the stain left on the ground or on a wall from Greek soul."