Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo /exhibitions, photo workshops.

Forty-five years of Stalin-style dictatorship, self-sufficiency and international isolation made 20th-century Albania a land without images. The collapse of the regime in the early 1990s led Greek photographer John Demos, disguised as a bus-riding tourist, to discreetly record change in the country's cities and towns. He later returned several times as a press correspondent. Nonetheless he opted for colour in his coverage of Albania's fevered period of transition. Despite constant harassment, this ‘tourist’ more interested in street scenes than landscapes managed to bring an attentive eye to ambience in a country then in a phase of radical change. Driven by a finely tuned curiosity and real empathy for the people he met, Demos surmounted the many difficulties in photos that eloquently convey both the drama – political meetings, score-settlings, scenes of exile – and the more humdrum moments – everyday life, learning democracy, experiencing a new-found liberty – of history in the making. The power of the resultant reportage lies in the certainty it gives viewers that they are actually ‘watching’ real events taking place; understanding people's feelings and thoughts as a country tests out the joys and pitfalls of putting freedom to work; and sensing a subtly nuanced range of micro-moments in Albania's historic progress towards rebirth.

John Demos

Born in 1944 in Thessaloniki, Greece. Lives in Greece.

He studied at the University of Chicago where he received a B.A. in Art History and an M.F.A. in Painting in 1968. Returning to Greece in 1969, he taught Photography, Fine Arts and Humanities at the American Academy in Athens.

It was during this period in the early 1970’s that Demos started to develop his own body of work. In 1976 he published his first monograph, The Greece that is Passing. After this publication he began his work on the Panigiria-Celebrations series, which was extensively exhibited in Europe during the 1980’s in venues and festivals such as the Rencontres d’Arles, the Primavera Fotografica in Barcelona, the Gulbenkian Modern Art Center in Lisbon and The Photographer’s Gallery in London have had one man shows of his work.

Demos has been an active promoter of photography in Greece.

In 1979, along with four other photographers, he founded the Photographic Center of Athens.

In 1988, together with his wife, Bernardine, he founded Apeiron Photos, to represent Magnum, and other major photo-agencies in Greece.

From 1995 to 1999 he created and ran, as Artistic Director, the Photographic Center of Skopelos for the Greek Ministry of Culture. Since then, he has curated some of the most significant exhibits in Greece.

The exhibition drawn from his book Shadows of Silence has travelled the world. John Demos is represented in major collections such as the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Gulbenkian, as well as in private collections.

EXHIBITIONS