John Stathatos
PHOTOSYNKYRIA 2000: WATCH ME (WATCH YOU)

Greece has experienced something of a boom in contemporary photography over the last decade, a development reflected by the burgeoning fortunes of Photosynkyria, the country's oldest established international visual arts event. Photosynkyria (which means something like "a fortuitous photographic encounter") reached its twelfth edition in February and March 2000, marking the occasion with two innovations: the appointment of revolving artistic directors, and the adoption of the event by the recently established Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. This last, however, proved largely theoretical, since so far the museum exists in name only; together with its virtual siblings, the city's proposed new museums of modern art and of design, the museum of photography has yet to be housed and funded, while the site originally earmarked for its use, a converted warehouse, is being eyed hungrily by an unholy alliance of developers and local politicians.
     Fortunately, Thessaloniki has already been blessed with an excellent visual arts institution, the privately founded and administered Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art whose galleries sheltered Watch Me (Watch You), the large international group exhibition forming the centrepiece of Photosynkyria 2000. Curated by Costis Antoniadis, this year's artistic director, Watch Me (Watch You) and a number of satellite one-person exhibitions examined the subject of the photographic gaze through an intriguing mix of familiar and unfamiliar work. At the heart of the exhibition was a remarkable set of images taken in the mountains of Crete during the nineteen fifties by one Pericles Striligas, itinerant photographer and purveyor of lucky charms. The paper negatives, recently brought to light by Eleni Christodoulaki, show peasants of both sexes sitting rigidly in threes and fours, staring straight at the camera, arms crossed or else lying flat on their thighs. We have no idea what lies behind this extraordinary performance, since the poses correspond to none of the known categories of Greek vernacular photography; they are far too stiff for commemorative images, while the variety of age groups makes it unlikely that they were intended for identity documents.
     Marc Garanger's stark black and white portraits of Arab women are also oddly unsettling; despite their finery, the women's expressions range from what looks like fear through contempt to a complete blank. The background to these images, however, is known to us. They were taken in 1960 at the height of France's Algerian war; the photographer was a conscript, and the photographs were to be used for identity cards as part of an anti-terrorist drive. According to Garanger, "The women would be lined up. Each in turn would sit on a stool outdoors, in front of the white wall of the house - the mechta. I would come to within three feet of them. They would be unveiled. […] They had no choice in the matter. Their only way of protesting was though their look". Interestingly, though these images are proffered as an almost excessively powerful case study of photography as violation, the morality of their further exposure and exploitation by Garanger did not appear to be challenged.
     Also on view were Andreas Müller-Pohle's monumental video stills of Japanese faces, encoded and typified as though for digital image recognition; Eleni Maligoura's haunting self-portraits; Georges Mara d'Ejove's L'entretien de Saint-Maur, a long frieze of homeless men from a shelter near Paris returning the viewer's gaze with stolid dignity; Thomas Florschuetz's segmented body images; Ulf Lundin's fake surveillance pictures, with their entirely convincing air of menace; Nick Waplington's voyeuristic forays into English proletarian lifestyles; and Katrina Lithgow's unvoyeuristic Naked Portraits of mothers and children.
     Two bodies of work by new or relatively unknown photographers who also had parallel one-person exhibitions stood out in particular. The first was a series of darkly enigmatic self-portraits by the young Athina Chroni, confidently assured images which managed to avoid the cloying narcissism normally characteristic of this genre. Outside the museum, Chroni exhibited an ingenious series of recent stereoscopic portraits; these were framed in groups, allowing a viewer sliding between the top and bottom mouldings to be moved back and forth as necessary.
     The second was Roger Ballen's series Outsider, square black and white portraits of what can only be called poor white trash in post-apartheid South Africa. Photographed inside their own homes, posed in the unforgiving glare of a flash gun against mostly minimal backgrounds, his grimacing subjects often seem physically maimed as well as demented. Inevitably reminiscent of Diane Arbus in style and content, these unforgiving images, though their subjects are infinitely less sympathetic than Garanger's Arab women, raised similar questions of photographic manipulation and objectification. It is to Photosynkyria's credit that Costis Antoniadis's adventurous curating enabled such questions to be posed, if not answered.

© John Stathatos, 2000
First published in contemporary visual arts 29, London, June 2000
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