"Costas Balafas for Mount Athos"
[...] On the Holy Mountain, when I went for the first time, I had plenty of hardware with me. I had the Rolleiflex as the main instrument and a Nikomat for interiors, so it would have a bright lens and low speeds. I never used flash-bulbs, because that destroys the surroundings; it takes so many irrelevant features that by using the light can isolate them. It is above all the inexorable realism of the camera lens which requires skill in its use, so that you isolate from the prosaicness of the other things the features which have aesthetic value, to give them precisely that lustre which art possesses, the magic of truth and of reality. Art, in its approach by man, has a beauty and it has the gift, if it is good in plastic terms, of living on after the artist. This we can see in the Homeric epics, which have not grown old even now, and which are the first source and mother of literature. Achilles would have been merely one among the thousands of warriors which every country has. But since Homer held him in high regard and presented him as such in his poem, he became the hero of peoples for the whole of humanity. Thus the photographer is concerned with how he can isolate, from the accumulation of the pedestrian, those things which have an aesthetic value. This is what I have tried to do, as far as have been able, of course; to approach nature.
Kostas Balafas
was born in 1920 of peasant parents, in the mountain village of Kypseli, in the prefecture of Arta, Epirus.
We first encounter him as a photographer in Ioannina, where he lived the experience of struggle of the insurgents against the occupying forces and recorded it in an album of photographs published under the title To Andartiko stin Epiro (“The Rebel Army in Epirus”).From 1951 on he worked as an employee for the Greek Public Electricity Company, devoting most of his spare time to photography.
The harsh living conditions of his childhood years and the struggles of the Greek people for independence and a dignified existence, marked him deeply and helped form his photographic style, most movingly and eloquently expressed in his portrayals of the toil and sorrows of the poor and humble, his favorite subjects.
His journeys from time to time on foot, covering almost the whole of Greece, are rendered in his own special way in his photographic recordings.
We first encounter him as a photographer in Ioannina, where he lived the experience of struggle of the insurgents against the occupying forces and recorded it in an album of photographs published under the title To Andartiko stin Epiro (“The Rebel Army in Epirus”).From 1951 on he worked as an employee for the Greek Public Electricity Company, devoting most of his spare time to photography.
The harsh living conditions of his childhood years and the struggles of the Greek people for independence and a dignified existence, marked him deeply and helped form his photographic style, most movingly and eloquently expressed in his portrayals of the toil and sorrows of the poor and humble, his favorite subjects.
His journeys from time to time on foot, covering almost the whole of Greece, are rendered in his own special way in his photographic recordings.
