demetris koilalous

I was born in Athens where I live & work, specializing in portrait, theatre and advertising photography. I think that my love for photography originates and my enthusiastic passion to observe –an obsession which I inherited from my father- a keen philatelist. My childhood memories from the mysterious landscape of the Campos of Chios -residence of the local and Genoese aristocracy of the C18th- shaped my conception of the Landscape and ever since I am looking for the mystery and ambiguity in every space that I photograph. I came across photography in Oxford in 1982 as a student. The same year I got my first camera and my first photographic books: "Les autres Ameriques”by S.Salgado & "Ordeal by Roses” by Hosoe & Y.Mishima; both influenced my oeuvre decisively. I studied Town Planning and Geography in Edinburgh & London. I was photographing passionately throughout those years, but I was moslty thrilled by the way I could correlate diverse disciplines like politics and philosophy with Art. In the 80s I got introduced to the secret and allegorical space of Theatre -a world of underlying relationships and invisible coordinated threads of interaction. Ultimately, exactly like in Theatre, photography for me poses questions about space, people and their hidden relations. Photography is about exposing the hidden layers of reality. It is a series of visual philosophical questions;enigmatic and ambiguous.