Άρις Γεωργίου

Remarks at the Opening of 'Bathmethon', an Exhibition of photos by Aris Georgiou at Athens Art Gallery, 17 March 2011

Aris Georgiou is an architect, and his photographs have the clear structure of architecture. But they are not static in the way that buildings are static. Often his photos represent activity. I don't mean they show activity in the way that a war photo or a sports photo shows activity. Rather, his photos represent activity -- they are at once still and moving: they are icons of activity.

When he makes a series of photos, the theme again may be latent activity. One of his series consists of women in red -- women wearing red clothes -- and the point I suppose is that a woman in red is going somewhere, she isn't simply going home. Another series is of cars: the cars in the photos are still, but they are ready to take us everywhere. Aris's new series is of stairs -- and we are so used to going up and down stairs, that any picture of stairs has the ghost of movement in it.

I was excited when Aris asked if I would join him, by writing a few words for the book, and by saying a few words tonight, because to me stairs are a fascinating subject. The sight of them gives me a lift. And stairs were one the first solid things that the human race invented. The oldest surviving buildings we know are pyramids -- in Central America, in ancient Iraq -- and most of these pyramids have flights of stairs leading straight up from the bottom to the top. People speak of 'the ascent of man', and these ancient stairs perhaps show us where the human race has always wanted to go. It has wanted to climb, and, as many individuals do, it wanted to get to the top.

Stairs are regular -- normally each step is the same as all the others -- and what the invention of stairs also shows is how systematic races, and cultures, and individuals have been about ascending, rising. Ambitious people climb social stairs, and steps in their careers. And holy souls climb spiritual stairs to purity and Heaven.

The stairs in Aris's pictures are more domestic than that. They climb to front doors, or to upper rooms, or bedrooms, or they wind up through villages. The variety of his stairs is clearer in the book, for there is not room in a gallery to show all of his fascinating photos of stairs.

But here in the gallery too we see how his stairs vary. On one wall there are grand shallow stairs that seem endlessly wide: they are clearly meant for a population to mount, easily, with comfort. There are narrow stairs in a private house, which look again as though they continue for ever. And there are makeshift wooden ladders for a workman, probably in a village, to climb to do a repair.

There is a question, as you look at these photos -- does the eye climb up the stairs to the top, or does it descend them to the bottom? What I noticed today, looking round the exhibition, is that the direction is determined by where the light falls. If the light falls on the tops steps, we see at once where the light is, but still our eye keeps going back, and climbing up again to the top. Or if the light falls on the bottom steps, the eye sees that, and keeps climbing down the stairs, again to the light.

These pictures remind us how much climbing we do in life, and at the same time they have the value of nostalgia -- as we look back at the way we used to climb up and down, when now we mostly go up and down in lifts.

But still, though the pictures speak of activity, they do not show it. There are no people on these stairs. We must imagine the people on them -- really we must be the climbers. But also I think it is good that we do not see someone on the stairs, because if we saw a person, our eye would stop there. It would fasten on the person, and lose the movement up and down.

But with all their latent movement, the fact remains that the pictures are still -- they are not movies. So I come back to Aris's other gift, as an architect. I would point to the great composition of these photos: they at once show us stairs, and resemble good abstract paintings. They have a dramatic geometry. Something my wife said about these photos, a little while ago, is very true. Julietta said that stairs 'make light geometrical'.

Even so, I guess one must say, in the end that climbing stairs can be tiring -- it can be kurastiko. So I think we should be grateful that Aris's photos climb the stairs for us. He shows us shots from the bottom step looking up, but also shots from the top step, looking down from a safe place.

We speak in England of flights of stairs. In a way stairs are wings, they raise us up. I think of these photos as many sets of wings, carrying us up bathmedon -- step by step -- to a high moment in the art of photography.

Dr John Harvey

Ο Dr John Harvey είναι Άγγλος λόγιος, κριτικός και βραβευμένος μυθιστοριογράφος. Διδάσκει λογοτεχνία και Οπτικό Πολιτισμό στο Πανεπιστήμιο Cambridge και είναι συνεργάτης Καθηγητής στο Emmanuel College του ίδιου Πανεπιστημίου. Το πιο πρόσφατο βιβλίο του με τίτλο Clothes είναι ένα φιλοσοφικό δοκίμιο για το έργο που ζητάμε από τα ρούχα μας να φέρουν σε πέρας για μας. Το προηγούμενο βιβλίο του Men in Black, που αφορά στο νόημα του μαύρου χρώματος στην αντρική ενδυμασία, έχει μεταφραστεί σε έξη γλώσσες. Το μυθιστόρημά του Coup d’ Etat, για την ελληνική δικτατορία των συνταγματαρχών, εκδόθηκε στα ελληνικά με τον τίτλο Το Πραξικόπημα το 1987.