Nikos Aliagas

Greek Soul, 2015-2016

The exhibition "Greek Soul" includes forty prints taken in Aliagas's ancestral Greece. At once his Greece and eternal Greece, the photographer’s images portray places full of emotion and people proud of their past, history, and country. In choosing to call the exhibition Greek Soul, Aliagas reveals the intimate and unspoken in each shot.

“To photograph Greece, the country of my ancestors. But from what point of view? What reality? That of the islands, or the sea and sky shrouded in degraded shades of blue, white and
fire? To immortalize eternal Greece, which still resists its end through its remains? Or to capture the Greece of today, mired by crisis and divided peoples?
Images abound and create many paradoxical perspectives. What compels me most in this seemingly contradictory country is precisely what is not said by photographic clichés, the soul of a people.
I photograph to capture the silences in the look of someone observing you, in the mysterious cabin of a fishing boat, and the chipped hands of its captain...the Greece of wanderings and voyages, where men and women still carry the names of past millennia and where the gods are still transformed into a beam of light as in the time that Heraclitus uttered, "the Sun is new every day." I love this country where the poets question the everyday more than they rhapsodize, like "the salt” so dear to Kazantzakis’ life, “that prevents rot. "
The Greece that I love to photograph resists inexorably. She stands up to the chimeras who take one thing for another; the Cassandras who only see ancient stones where some consider each plot of the marble ages as a talisman of their DNA. The souls that I photograph are not afraid of the vanities and fears of the modern man. The souls that I meet ignore the ravages of time; they prefer to follow their "kairos" and keep only the essentials, like a daydream where black and white moves away from the colorful procession of sirens. "

---

---

---

Hands, 2015-2016

---

Cities, 2015-2016