05 – 30 November 2013 / Gallery 512 (Ptolemaida)
Opening: Tuesday 05 November, 19.00
Place: Gallery 512 (Ptolemaida, 56, 25is Martiou str., tel. 2463080506)
Opening hours: Mon, Tu, Fr 10.00-14.00, 18.00-21.00 We, Thu, Sa 10.00-14.0
From the TMP (Thessaloniki Museum of Photography) collection
The exhibition, a production of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and diadrasi.org, presents colored photographs from tobacco factories in the Greek towns of Agrinio, Volos, Kavala, Drama and Xanthi, produced from September of 2003 until January of 2007.
Through his photographs, Kamilo Nollas illustrates the industrial heritage left by the tobacco industry in Greece. Today, most of these factories remain abandoned, isolated from any urban conscience, neglected by citizens and overlooked by public institutions. As such, they have become non-existent. If one tried to encompass what they stand for, he would have to say that they relate to a so-called “industrial unconscious”. In fact, alongside their emotional yet rough, materialistic nature they also possess a sort of psychic abundance, a concealed “spiritual space” that expresses a series of distressed manifestations of modernization: namely, all the rejections, the condensations and the transpositions that define today’s modern cities and towns.
Nollas’s photographs discretely reveal how these spaces maintain a sort of shattered life, but above all, they record a lack of industrial consciousness that Greek towns were never able to reverse. He portrays these spaces through images that generate feelings of curiosity, surprise, obscurity, melancholy, even pity and forgetfulness, while at the same time, inviting the spectator to contemplate. His photographs imprint spatial relationships as indications, trails and remnants of time itself.
By taking photographs indoors and using natural light and shadows, Nollas captures in film the very “air breathed” by these empty, yet imposing and full of history spaces.
Kamilo Nollas
Born in 1968 in Paris. He studied the art of photography in Liege, in Lyon and in Athens. In parallel with his personal work, since 1992, he has been working as a freelance photographer and as a photography instructor based in Greece. He has worked with major print and electronic media, leading publishing companies and established public and private organizations. His personal work has been presented in Greece and abroad while selected prints belong to private and public collections. He received a Fulbright foundation art-scholarship for the year 2009-2010.
www.kamilonollas.com