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Book
Photograms of a Lifetime
Photograms are the creations of a darkroom technique, without the use of any camera. They are unique prints, like multiple impressions of the shadow of an object. Through photograms, I “see” hibiscuses dancing, wooden air balloons surrounded by flying seeds. There, the smallest objects become great, and I swirl with them as in a dream… To me, they are not just part of my daily life, considering that as photograms they are part of my professional occupation as well as my inner nature. They are the fruit of profound and continuous work, as l have been involved with them for the last 20 years. I have become so identified with them that I am afraid that I have lost any objectivity concerning my work.
I invite you, then, to travel via my book – which is a collection of these works – to their world, to surrender for a while to their dream dimension and the light shed through them…
Maria Drakaki – Paros
Photograms are the creations of a darkroom technique, without the use of any camera. They are unique prints, like multiple impressions of the shadow of an object. Through photograms, I “see” hibiscuses dancing, wooden air balloons surrounded by flying seeds. There, the smallest objects become great, and I swirl with them as in a dream… To me, they are not just part of my daily life, considering that as photograms they are part of my professional occupation as well as my inner nature. They are the fruit of profound and continuous work, as l have been involved with them for the last 20 years. I have become so identified with them that I am afraid that I have lost any objectivity concerning my work.
I invite you, then, to travel via my book – which is a collection of these works – to their world, to surrender for a while to their dream dimension and the light shed through them…
Maria Drakaki – Paros
Preface
”Love of beauty is the bridge between God and man,” said Nikiforos Lytras once. After all, every culture reflects through its creations this human tendency to bridge our inner chasms by reflecting the beauty, the vision of the idealized that leads to perfection, and thus to divinity. Fate, destiny, however one calls it, by de-symbolising this tendency of culture that is reflected through music, visual arts, cinema, or the art of photography, one cannot but face the conflict rising from the struggle between emotions and ideas that characterize human societies. After all, the Greek word for Art (tékne) comes from the ancient Greek verb tíktō, which means to give birth, therefore implying pain (strong pain, conflict to bring the new life out of the darkness into the light), just like the word toketós (birth), to which it is etymologically related. Life is occasionally illuminated even in refraction through the different expressions of art representing it and seeking, to put it in psychoanalytic terms, vindication.
This is how I felt when Maria Drakaki entrusted me with the photograms of her lifetime so that I would express my opinion on them. I bowed over her works with the awe accompanying the uninitiated to a new art form, and I must confess that I greatly admired these works, the fruit of her twenty-year-long involvement with them.
Within the difficult and unprecedented situation we have been experiencing for a year due to the pandemic, art cannot but work in a consoling as well as cathartic manner, because only Art has the power to lift the human soul, even briefly, from the trials and tribulations it suffers.
I would like to thank Maria Drakaki for bestowing me with the honour to partake in her work and to share the paths of her art, even for a little while. An art that elevates our native land, Paros, as it constitutes not only a place of creation but also a source of inspiration.
My dear Maria, may your book fly off the shelves!!!
Ifigenia Hadjigeorgiou – Philologist