The Shadow of Things, photo essay by Antigone Kourakou.
[L]ooking at Antigone Kourakou’s photographs, one fully perceives the suggestive range of photographic abstraction. Although there is scarce visual information that connects the pictures with the real scenes, the situations, and the events they were born out of, the photographs imperatively call for our interpretation. They expect us to bring the ghosts back to reality, to rationalize the impossibilities they depict. The challenge is unrelenting, recurring and invariably leading to a dead end. And it is exactly this inability to explain them which lends them the poetic dimension that marks Kourakou’s work.
In her photographs, even when depiction is complete, the intention to photograph this or the other subject remains unfathomable. Nevertheless, details of faces, remote figures, landscapes or indoor spaces shot from different angles are assimilated into a concrete form of photographic approach. Kourakou entered the field of photography totally unprepared, without having studied it, her only weapon being her unquenchable curiosity about the shadow of things, about ‘something other than reality’ that lurks in her subjects, and seems to be hiding behind the surface of their photographic representation. Without predefined rules or specific pursuits, the process of photographing things yields unanticipated aspects, which guide the photographer to an incessant quest of the unseen.
(Costis Antoniadis)
