Kyriakos Michailidis lives in Drama - a city in Northern Greece. To him, photography is the medium to communicate with his inner self and look for truth in everything around. His photography of urban and transient landscape is clean and fresh. It’s definitive both in form and content. It draws viewers’ attention with its simplicity, sincerity, surprise, shock, and solace.
About: I was born in Drama in 1982, a city in northern Greece, where I live and work until today. I studied Business Administration in Kavala. I got into photography in 2006 and since then I have attended many seminars of photography and I have participated in group exhibitions as well. At first I used to take pictures in 3:2 format but slowly I realized that square format fits perfectly to my perspective and now I stick to it. In the beginning I was trying to capture beautiful images of the world, but slowly I understood that there were abundant internal images in connection with the sites around me. For me, photography is like a prayer. An internal dialogue gets into materiality. It is a relation of deep love and passion.
Statement and technique: The landscape today is a dynamic canvas that evolves positively or negatively through time. The human factor intervenes transforming it and changing it into something new. The images I make are usually landscapes in the limits of urban, outwardly and surreal pictures of my town, a complication of evolution and abandonment over time. My pictures show this antithesis. My photos seem to have been photographed easily, with an almost direct to the issue view and a purity in the form. This provides an easy first reading of my images and slowly reveals many things once deepens. All this, through my photograph, take a different meaning and substance. I photograph exclusively in square format. Composition and colour play decisive role in my photos. I see without a camera most of the pictures and then, I come back again and again to find the appropriate lighting conditions to photograph them. Human element is a rarity in my pictures, and when there is, it simply completes the position of my frame. Then I edit my photos with detail and print them to see the final result. I take pictures with digital cameras, but I want to access the medium format and the film which I believe will give me great advantages.
Projects: At present I’m interested in and working on the landscape around me … How economic crisis, evolution and people affect and alter landscape and how it is evolves through time. In the future, I would like to work on something more alien to me, far away from my place but what intrigues me is always the landscape and what it carries (memories, human intervention, etc.). The human element interests me more as intervention than presence in my pictures.
Influences and favorite stuff: One of my favorite art is cinema and I cannot avoid mentioning the interior and poetic gaze of Andrei Tarkovsky, who influenced me at the beginning of my work. I would also say that my work is greatly influenced by the movement of New topographics and in particular by the artists Stephen shore, Robert Adams, and the masters of color like William Eggleston and Alex Webb.
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