John Stathatos (b. Athens, 1947) is a Greek photographer. He studied and lived in England for many years, and his work has been exhibited throughout Europe. He has curated large exhibitions and major international events including the Israel Photography Biennale and Thessaloniki Photosynkyria, and written on the medium in numerous books, magazines and catalogues. His personal publications include The Book of Lost Cities (2005), which won the Rencontres Internationales Photographiques ‘Aide au projet’ prize at Arles in 2004, and airs, waters, places (2009). He contributed significantly to the emergence of Greek photographic studies through the exhibitions and associated catalogues The Invention of Landscape: Greek photography and Greek landscape 1860-1995, Image and Icon: The New Greek Photography, 1975-1995, the first in-depth critical study of contemporary Greek photography, and Ways of Telling: Photography and Narrative. In 2002 he founded the annual Kythera Photographic Encounters and the associated Conference on the History of Greek photography. He is based on the island of Kythera.
Stathatos’ photography focuses on landscape and artefact. Though he has written texts on photographic portraiture, and the human subject appears in his earlier work, what remains is impersonal. For the series Three Heraclitean Elements (1991), which shows the way natural forms, closely photographed to the point of abstraction, change when the three primordial elements (earth, water, fire) theorized by Heraclitus interact, he wrote that his work “is concerned with the use of landscape imagery in terms of its cultural and historical associations”. Though the theory of the elements can seem outdated, when we see a landscape ravaged by fire, with blackened tendrils of plant husks set against bare ground, it immediately springs up from cultural memory.
The photographs of Stathatos take stock of what has been — in frames where organic life has all but disappeared — to be reconstructed in the imaginary. Whether showing walls that were once meant to delineate plots of land between peasants, now lying abandoned, that have become arbitrary mounds of rock in the Greek landscape (Walls, 1992, Lithoi, 2006), or a goat pelt left to the work of time (Scapegoat, 2010), he has transferred the stark poetic of Eugène Atget to the natural world.
Two things above all interest me in the nature of photography. First, the medium's close, almost inevitable relationship to the workings of memory, and second, the inherent ability of photographs to signify more than is represented on the surface of the print or negative - a process of accretion which depends, precisely, on the play of memory, on metaphor and on allusion.
