Each photograph seems to divide the world in two: into a very small part, defined by the photographic frame, which describes a specific space or event, and another surrounding it, vast, absolute void, a place of silence and indefinite time. This division, however, is fictitious. When one looks at a photograph, the content of the photographic frame extends into the surrounding emptiness: the spectator is invited to give the space its natural continuity, to assume that which preceded and predict that which will follow. What is photographed is in the end restored as an instant, a fragment of one version of “reality”.
In the work of Stelios Efstathopoulos, this restoration of what has been photographed is impossible, except in a world inhabited by queer creatures, phantoms and scarecrows. Moving from the center of the pictures towards the periphery the description becomes increasingly nebulous, so that the boundary of the photographic frame is displaced towards the interior of the picture. The photographed scenes are projected onto the surface of the photographic paper as the reflections of the world around them, an obviously complex photographic device that in the end assimilates spectators and masqueraders in a scenery dominated by the mysterious.
(Costis Antoniades)
