LEONIDAS PAPAZOGLOU

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE TIME OF THE MACEDONIAN STRUGLE

We live in the era of a worldwide photographic inflation: everybody is taking a lot of pictures documenting even the most insignificant events of their lives. The act of photography has become ubiquitous and banal. We create huge, often unmanageable archives on our digital gadgets, but how often do we look at those documents again? Why do we create so many of them? Will those archives interest future generations?

We invite you to encounter a small selection of portraits which were taken more than one hundred years ago by Leonidas Papazoglou.

Leonidas Papazoglou was born in 1872 in Kastoria, studied photography in Constantinople and around 1898 started working as a professional photographer in his native town, which then was a part of the declining Ottoman Empire.

He portrayed the inhabitants of Kastoria during the tense period of emerging and increasing struggle between different ethnic groups in the Macedonia for domination over territories gradually abandoned by the Turks.

Papazoglou’s photographs portray, with the same uniform and non-discriminative attitude, representatives of all social groups of the once richly multicultural and integrated Kastoria: Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, Turkish-Albanians, Slavophones, men, women, clergy, lay people, villagers, bourgeois, military, Comitadjis, and civilians.

What can we learn from these photographs about people and the time when they were alive and active? What can be understood about the photographer and his artistic skills and his personality? Did he sympathize with his models? All of them? What kind of emotions did the people of Kastoria experience in front of Leonidas Papazoglou’s lens?

And maybe we can ask some more general questions:

Why photographs from the past look so different from those we see now on Facebook? What happened to the ceremony of photographic act since the beginning of the previous century? Will it still engage people one hundred years from now?

Some answers are right in front of your eyes, some you will find in the book which accompanies this exhibition and some may appear when you take your next photograph.

The photographs are courtesy of a generous loan from the Photographic Museum of Thessaloniki and Kythera Cultural Association.