There are places we visit for the first time and yet they feel strangely familiar.
In the winter of 2019, I travelled through Monument Valley in the heart of Navajo land. The landscape was far from the iconic images often associated with the American Southwest. Snow covered the red earth, the sky remained heavy and grey, and the desert seemed suspended in a silence both vast and intimate.
One evening, almost by chance, we spent the night in a traditional Hogan. Built from earth and wood, the circular shelter contained only the essentials: a stove, a few handmade objects, and the warm glow of firelight. Outside, the desert disappeared into darkness and snow. Inside, time seemed to slow down.
As the hours passed, I began to feel that I was no longer only in Arizona.
The sound of burning wood, the smell of earth, the shifting light on the walls and the sense of being protected from the cold awakened memories that had remained untouched for decades. I found myself returning to a small village in northern Greece, where I lived with my grandparents as a child.
The house was built from mud. Winter evenings unfolded around a wood-burning stove while snow covered the landscape outside and the room glowed red from the fire.
Yet another memory remained equally vivid. During the day, I would often watch my grandmother sitting beside a window, knitting and quietly singing to herself. From time to time she would lift her eyes and gaze outside, while the daylight gently fell across her face. It was an ordinary moment, repeated countless times, yet it remained with me long after those years had passed.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether that recurring scene became one of the first visual memories that shaped the way I see the world — a figure, a window, and light entering a room.
Perhaps this is why, decades later, I continue to photograph people near windows, returning unconsciously to the same relationship between light, presence and shelter.
The First Window is not only a reflection on a journey through the American Southwest. It is a meditation on memory, belonging and the invisible connections between distant places. The photographs explore how light, textures, sounds and landscapes can reopen forgotten doors within us, and how an unfamiliar place can sometimes bring us closer to home than any place we have known before.
What began as a night in a Hogan became something else entirely: a return to the origins of memory, and perhaps to the origins of seeing itself.
