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GreecePhoto Essays

The Shadow of Things

TSEPELOVO, GREECE – December 2012. Α female hand opens the curtain.

The Shadow of Things, photo essay by Antigone Kourakou.


[L]ooking at Antigone Kourakou’s photographs, one fully perceives the suggestive range of photographic abstraction. Although there is scarce visual information that connects the pictures with the real scenes, the situations, and the events they were born out of, the photographs imperatively call for our interpretation. They expect us to bring the ghosts back to reality, to rationalize the impossibilities they depict. The challenge is unrelenting, recurring and invariably leading to a dead end. And it is exactly this inability to explain them which lends them the poetic dimension that marks Kourakou’s work.
In her photographs, even when depiction is complete, the intention to photograph this or the other subject remains unfathomable. Nevertheless, details of faces, remote figures, landscapes or indoor spaces shot from different angles are assimilated into a concrete form of photographic approach. Kourakou entered the field of photography totally unprepared, without having studied it, her only weapon being her unquenchable curiosity about the shadow of things, about ‘something other than reality’ that lurks in her subjects, and seems to be hiding behind the surface of their photographic representation. Without predefined rules or specific pursuits, the process of photographing things yields unanticipated aspects, which guide the photographer to an incessant quest of the unseen.
(Costis Antoniadis)

ATHENS, GREECE – January 2016. Young woman resting on a couch.
ATHENS, GREECE – November 2010. A girl, play with her shadow.
ATHENS, GREECE – May 2014. Woman with the silk scarf.
ATHENS, GREECE – April 2014. Wooden objects from the past.
ATHENS, GREECE – December 2012. A girl leans over a sink.
ATHENS, GREECE – October 2014. Spiral staircase.
TSEPELOVO, GREECE – December 2011.Girl with a small glass sphere.
ATHENS, GREECE – August 2013. Part of an old wall.
ATHENS, GREECE – December 2012. A woman leaning on a stair.
ATHENS, GREECE – July 2011. The girl with the hidden face I.
SYROS, GREECE – August 2015.The girl with the hidden face II.
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Antigone Kourakou

She was born in November 1979. She lives and works in Athens as an art conservator-restorer. At the same time, she is professionally occupied… More »

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