Nomadic Library

Resume

“Spyros Staveris is known to the general public from his photographs which have been published in magazines since the nineties. This exhibition, which is a retrospective of his work, reveals that the range of his interests and his style are not limited to that era or to those photographs. It is not only the “girls” on Athinas Street, the seedy music joints, the lumpen side of Athens, the city’s nightlife and its “cult” figures that the artist focuses on. He photographs the urban landscape, the Dionysian aspect of the islands’ religious festivals, people from Greece and abroad (anonymous faces as well as celebrities), demonstrations and street events, everyday life. And of course, he travels, which was in fact how his career as a photographer began: on a trip he took to Turkey in 1987. Spyros Staveris describes himself as a “photographer without qualities”. Just like Musil’s hero, Staveris clearly wishes to break with convention, to infiltrate the complex fabric of everyday life and take photographs. Constantly. His love for the image began with cinema, while his most dominant memories are of a circus. The “spectacle”. That’s how he started out as a self-taught photographer and that’s how he continued for the next thirty years. Meanwhile, the meaning of “the spectacle” became broader and its meaning was ultimately reversed. Images which were trapped in the “society of the spectacle” are given new meaning by the artist and take on depth, before they are offered again to that same public, but this time shaped by his sideways glance”.
Vangelis Ioakimidis