Andreas Vassiliou (English Text) It all started a spring afternoon, after a lost game of backgammon. An inexplicable impulse at the time led me to a photography equipment store where i got all the necessary to set up a dark room.
Little by little I bought my first cameras, a few black and white films and a “gas station”. My old car was transformed into a hotel room and the little villages of Cyprus into unknown and unexplored destinations. I learned to watch for the first time – the landscapes, the narrow alleys, the people were formed into feelings.
The incessant clicks would “freeze� all the magic of an internal world and make their appearance under the red, dim light of the dark room.The magic of photography lies in the way each one of us sees and apprehends the world, which is actually a world hidden within them and gradually unfolds and is reflected into the space one moves. Photography is nothing more than feelings.
In reality, you take photos of your own being without expecting any Ithaca ahead (a metaphor for a personal goal/destination inspired by a poem by Cavafy), but the experiences one gains along the way. A photographer’s prime duty is the conscious honesty and acceptance of one’s own self followed by the effort to awaken hidden or even languorous feelings to the viewer. I began to travel going along with the “Doctors Without Borders, Cyprus” to the Gaza Strip, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka. Every project would bring me closer to the “Doctors” … I had also been a member of the Board of Directors for four consecutive years. Eight years ago, along with a few other “crazy” guys, we established the Sophia Foundation For Children
Institution andas a result we built a children’s home in Kenya which is run solely by us.
We provide daily meals to more than three thousand children in five different areas of Kenya, we have been offering meals to seventeen all day schools across the whole of Cyprus for four years now and we continue functioning based on the same initial “madness�. At the end of the day, the main purpose of Art is the improvement of man as well as the world we live in.
Having grown in a country where the language itself is alive and rich with meanings, the words thatI have been preoccupied with lately are Ugliness and Beauty.
Ugly is anything without shape or form (in greek “ά-σχημο” consists of the privative α- and the word “shape”) Beautiful is a shape with the symbol of the circle (completion) in front of it (“Ομορφο” in Greek, having the letter/symbol “O” as a starting one) Through a series of experimental portraits I try to detect Beauty and its glory and to humbly approach the meaning of Love. We are all beautiful providing that we see this through Light.
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