The decade of 2010, during which most of the photos in this album were taken, was an era of transition in Greece.
The deep socioeconomic crisis affected all of us, both in a geographic and a generational sense, in many different ways. On the face of it, at least, nothing remained unchanged for long and a new kind of daily life started to emerge. All of this seemed to point to the end of an era. Similar to older photographic works by Panagiotis Sotiropoulos, Corpora Sine Memoria (1991) and Patras – A Photographic Profile of a Vanishing City (2006), the starting point is here again, ‘loss’. The images of the album “Anonymous Paths” do not illustrate the crisis but rather, they walk the line between a “before”, an uncertain ”now” and an even more uncertain “after”. Sotiropoulos takes his pictures quietly, with the restless gaze of a roamer who wishes to arrest the total image of a place and an era. In the varied complex of images presented in the exhibition, he is guided, as he states, by the thought that a person’s destiny is never solely an individual one and that behind every kind of difficulty or dysfunction hide, almost always, the specter of collective destiny and the common human breath.
Coincidentally, today, there is something ironic in the fact that while the pandemic forces each one of us to stay put, at the same time, it shows us how inextricably interdependent we all are. From this visual angle, perhaps, it is a unique opportunity to take another look at some fundamental questions about our lives. We would like to believe that a crisis makes self-evident what, until yesterday, was inconceivable but in due time, when all of this will be behind us, we will most probably return to the previous fragile and carefree “normality”.
