The Port

THE PORT … there, to the west of Thessaloniki, at the water’s edge, the city port in the twilight… All the machinery and equipment one would expect at such a location: ships at their moorings, cables and ropes stretched taut, cranes, passages and pathways through the maze, railway wagons on their rails… Not a human figure in sight… everything suspended in absolute immobility. A sense of energy frozen, time ceased, place undefined, which lends an element of drama to the gigantic, elevated equipment, like great beasts waiting a command to spring into action! The scene is bizarre, unfamiliar… a world of cyclopean machines leading their own autonomous existence, unchallenged, supreme rulers, against a background of sea and sky, among the huge and ever-shifting heaps of minerals in transit. The photographer’s eye has transformed these elements into scenes of an unsettling time, ‘metallic’, almost unearthly, clearly expressing a conviction that each photograph is a fantastic narrative, presented as a real scene in some alternative world… Thalea Stephanidou