The more I photograph people, the more I understand that what happens between two people at the moment of a photograph is far more complex than a simple act of recording. The people who stand in front of my camera do not simply permit me to photograph them. They entrust me with a part of themselves.
Having photographed many men, I can say with certainty that there is always something that draws me towards them. It may be their face, their body, the way they move, or the way they look at me. Sometimes it is simply the status or the work of someone I admire. Almost always, there is desire. A desire to move closer and to get to know someone through photography.
This series consists of 14+1 such choices.
In their eyes, I recognise something of my own desire. I find myself looking for things that are difficult to name: love, reassurance, intimacy, admiration. Perhaps even the gaze a child waits for from an adult when they want to feel truly seen.
When I photograph someone, I hide behind a camera. There is a strange distance between us: the camera separates us, yet at the same time it becomes the place where we meet. And almost always, I will ask them to stand beside a window.
Natural light has always fascinated me. I like its simplicity and the way it enters a room, touches skin and fabric, changes with the hour, and reveals without imposing itself.
Only recently did I realise something else. Placing someone beside a window seems to have been part of the way I have looked at things for a very long time.
When I was five, I lived with my grandparents in a small village near the Turkish border, far from my parents. Winters in Greece were much colder then, with heavy snow. In the small, low-ceilinged house, made of mud, there was an old wooden sofa in the room where we lived and slept. Above it was a window.
During the cold winter days, I would watch my grandmother sitting on the sofa, leaning lazily towards the window, knitting and quietly singing, while the light fell across her face, her constantly moving hands, and her clothes.
It was an ordinary image from my childhood, but it has stayed with me deeply. I would play at her feet, carefree, with different toys, right beside the wood-burning stove that filled the small room with warmth.
Decades later, I still place people beside a window and watch them in that light. I do not know exactly whether there is a connection between these two images. But I feel that there is.
Is it intimacy? Recognition? Tenderness? A familiar warmth? Love, perhaps? Someone to affirm my presence in the world?
My camera allows me to remain at a distance.
But it also allows me, if only for a moment, to ask for something in return.
Look at me.
Look back at me.
