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ATHENS WALLS
For over 30 years I’ve trained my camera on tens of thousands of walls from Bangkok to Bogota via Beirut.
Walls are like a city’s memory. They speak in a local dialect, of a specific moment in an intensely specific place.
Athens is a special place for me. My mother was an Athenian and I've been going there since I was a very small child.
Since 2010 I have been photographing the tragedy of the Greek crisis as it unfolds. I seek out those “walls of democracy” where slogans, posters and street art frantically fight for space then fade away. Graffiti open masks exquisite examples of street art. The whole poster, the complete statement, has often vanished, but its shreds - the ghosts of the wall it was a week ago or month ago - are there to haunt us.
I photograph, without manipulation, the spontaneous expression of history as it is written in the street, sometimes even with humour. These photographs “like life, are fragmented, layered, complete in their incompletion.”
Athens Walls” brings together rebels, rebetes and innocent victims.
For over 30 years I’ve trained my camera on tens of thousands of walls from Bangkok to Bogota via Beirut.
Walls are like a city’s memory. They speak in a local dialect, of a specific moment in an intensely specific place.
Athens is a special place for me. My mother was an Athenian and I've been going there since I was a very small child.
Since 2010 I have been photographing the tragedy of the Greek crisis as it unfolds. I seek out those “walls of democracy” where slogans, posters and street art frantically fight for space then fade away. Graffiti open masks exquisite examples of street art. The whole poster, the complete statement, has often vanished, but its shreds - the ghosts of the wall it was a week ago or month ago - are there to haunt us.
I photograph, without manipulation, the spontaneous expression of history as it is written in the street, sometimes even with humour. These photographs “like life, are fragmented, layered, complete in their incompletion.”
Athens Walls” brings together rebels, rebetes and innocent victims.
© Brenda Turnnidge
