Opening: Wednesday 5 March 2025, 19:00
Humans and all aspects of their representation, in every context -familial, social, professional, gendered, microhistory as well as microhistory- are put into… frames, at the new, photographic exhibition under the title “About Humans”, organised by MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (Warehouse A’, Pier A’, Thessaloniki Port), from 5 March until 14 September 2025.
The exhibition presents an anthology of 107 works by Greek photographers or of Greek descendancy, historical and contemporary, from the Museums’ collections. The works outline, from the dawn of the 20th century until today, amongst others, staged portraits and nudes, the representation of the current or historical social and political condition, the snapshot activity with its natural spontaneity, the directorial invention with the fully controlled space.
They incorporate also unusual narratives, visual experimentations, journalistic idioms, metaphors on issues central for the human existence, such as death or the familiar versus the foreign, and the examination of self in the era of me culture. The exhibition closes with a note on tomorrow: the depiction of the post-human through special software and application of artificial intelligence.
A timeline
Ever since its official announcement in 1839, photography has been used as a “mirror with memory” of the human existence (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1859), granting it an illusion of immortality in eras of high mortality. The initially conventional personal or group pose, validating identity and describing the figure, was gradually enriched as the medium’s technology evolved, with images more spontaneous, even unknowing. The plethora of photographs with human subjects were recording fragmented and vital elements of the social relations, the customs of an epoch, the working conditions, the major events, personal and collective life, microhistory as well as macrohistory. Through this wealth of images and while crossing all the sweeping social and technological changes, the human seems to have remained at the center of the photographic visibility: from photographic art, photojournalism and social documentary, to fashion, advertisement and most of all photography as memory, this standardized as much as unpredictable category of images flourishing today mainly through the iconographic storm of the social media. And when the human was not markedly present in the frame, very often its traces and the consequences of its actions could be discerned. In this way, photography seems to have assisted, even unintentionally, in the furthering of anthropocentrism in contemporary era rather than its weakening.
Curated by: Hercules Papaioannou
Participating photographers: Periklis Alkidis, Costas Balafas, Ilias Bourgiotis, Lizzie Calligas, Olga Deikou, Pavlos Fyssakis, Socratis Iordanidis, Nikos J. Kallianiotis, Natassa Kantemiri, Viktor Koen, Panos Kokkinias, Nikos Koukis, Evangelia Kranioti, Yiannis Konstantinou, Dimitris Letsios, Pepi Loulakaki, Dimitris Michalakis, Katharina Mouratidi, Giorgos Moutafis, Thodoros Nikoleris, Panayotis Papadimitropoulos, Leonidas Papazoglou, Lia Smaragda, Spyros Staveris, Yiannis Stylianou, Katerina Tsakiri, Dimitris Tsoumblekas, Kalliopi Voutzali, Stavros Xiros, Nikoletta Zissi
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