Christos Sotiropoulos: Is that all there is

Like many who were born at the height of urbanism (1980s), I too left my village to create my own life and family in an urban center. As years passed, I became more and more distant from the relationships and memories I had created with the place I was born.

After my son was born, several weekend trips involved organized nature activities (ranches, zoos and botanical gardens, organized camping and hiking). The enthusiasm and imagination he mustered to interact with nature, triggered my own memories. My son did the same things I did as a kid. Except that for me then, it was part of my everyday life, while for my son it was part of a cultural product to be consumed. I noticed the same was true of other parents who, unlike me, had grown up in cities. Therefore, I understood that a part of my soul was always dedicated to the place where I grew up: the Greek countryside.

My body remembered again walking on inaccessible paths, smelling moisture from soil planted with olives and wild grasses, breathing the hot -plane leaf filtered- air of summer noon. I realized that I had learned to speak and understand the behavior of people, who were very different from those who made up my daily life in the city. People, whose imagination and personality were shaped by the place itself, sculpted both by myths and by modern Greek history.

For all of the above, I decided to turn my respect for the Greek province into a photo book, that avoids stereotypical representations of it and tries to highlight its complexity and peculiarities through the symbiosis of its people with nature. As for me, the Greek countryside is not just the place where I grew up.

It is the place where I matured and learned how to live my adult life.