John Stathatos
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This is a strangely desolate and unfocused landscape: power pylons rising above olive trees, two and three-story buildings looming over humbler dwellings of breeze-block and plastic sheeting, and gaping ferroconcrete skeletons apparently foresaken by their owners. The ground is stony, with a thin covering of withered grass and thorns; further back, there are occasional glimpses of deeply eroded hills, limestone ribs dotted with a stubble of tough, leathery shrubs. An overpowering sense of transience and indeterminacy: piles of rubble, the almost unkillable dwarf fig-trees, and a morose, fussy civic memorial to god knows what or whom, with its miniature wrought-iron gate, futile marble staircase and honour guard of agaves with their hard, sword-like leaves. A plowed field suddenly emerges from behind the mean houses, a row of newly-planted trees, an empty lot, and then perhaps a stretch of freshly-tarmaced road leading from nowhere to noplace. The inhabitants of this ephemeral landscape occupy it precariously, like tenants with shaky leases: children, mostly; some women; few men. The children flit lightly past, unconcerned; they play self-absorbed games with their grandfather's walking stick, outstare their elders and the camera, scamper up the memorial steps, play hide-and seek among the sheets of plastic, observe with dispassionate interest. Stunned with fatigue, the women look stony or distant; their smiles are all used up. The men turn away, not discourteously but with finality: what is there to say? And then there are the animals, which together with the children seem the real inheritors of this corrupted Eden: those indomitable sheep on their little hummock in the middle of an urban wasteland, but also the goat clambering into the branches of an olive-tree, the calf slumped with hopeless resignation in some sinister breeze-block courtyard, and above all the dogs, most of them wandering about free as the air. Thin, street-savvy dogs, with pointed muzzles and tails curling upwards, like those on Attic vases, wary yet longing to be friendly. The well-off sometimes wonder why the poor saddle themselves with so many animals; the reason is that it takes very little to make a dog happy, and a dog's happiness can be infectious. Hector Dimissianos has turned his camera on this dusty no-man's-land, neither city nor country nor suburbia but a confusing, dystopic mixture of all three: the western fringes of the vast Athens-Piraeus conurbation, a chaotic region of mixed industrial and residential use, much of it unzoned. The city itself, like some toxic amoeba, doubling in size over and over again during the last half-century, now sprawls across the entire basin of Attica, spreading like a cancer north towards Marathon and south-east towards Cape Sounion. It seems unstoppable, and as it spreads, it destroys: forests go up in flames, the thin topsoil washes away and is replaced by concrete and tarmac. The dynamic of the progression is as complex as that of any disease: the depopulation of the countryside after the civil war, the capital's inescapable gravitational pull, the spiralling cost of land, political ineptitude, corruption and greed all play a role. But whereas the north-eastern suburbs are where the rich and newly rich flee to, desperate to escape the pollution following them inexorably up the hills, the western fringes, from Perama on the coast up to Aspropyrgos, are where the unwanted and marginalised end up: the poorest of the poor, those without contacts or influence to give them a hand up, the inevitable losers in the game of neo-liberal capitalism, but also political refugees new and old, economic refugees, and those perennial occupants of society's lowest niche in every Balkan and East European country, the gypsies. And yet - an important reservation, and one which Dimissianos's cool but not unengaged images successfully convey - this social landscape, while grim, is not entirely hopeless: this not the Bronx, nor the hellish drug and violence-ridden satellite townships of Manchester or Glasgow. The poverty may be extreme, but these people have not given up. They make do, improvise, work hard. They cultivate what land they can, keep chickens, run tiny neighbourhood cafés, collect donations towards a new parish church. With luck, their squatted or illegally constructed dwellings will sooner or later be legalised in exchange for votes: a politically fruitful process, and cheaper by far than a proper national housing policy. On paper, Greece's building and zoning regulations are among the most stringent in Europe. Social documentary, particularly that which proffers a critique, however indirect, of social deprivation, has never been a significant element of Greek photography; the lure of the picturesque usually proves too strong, even for avowedly left-wing photographers like Spyros Meletzis. The lineage is brief but distinguished: Voula Papaioannou's images of starvation in Nazi-occupied Athens, Dimitri Harissiadis' record of refugee camps at the end of the civil war (1948-49), and, from within the New Greek Photography movement, the work of Nikos Markou on Perama and the Athens gasworks (1982-84), of Nikos Panayotopoulos and Yiorgos Depollas on the Leros lunatic asylum (1982), and of Stelios Efstathopoulos on gypsies (1989). Made with a strong instinct for the poetics of everyday life, Hector Dimissianos's photographs convey compassion without sentimentality or prurience; his first monograph is a welcome and accomplished addition to this list. |
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| © John Stathatos 2001 First published in Hector Dimissianos, The Fringes of the City, University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 2001 |
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