The black-and-white versions of the photographs taken by Fokion Zissiadis in Iceland indicate a shift in the photographer’s attention, away from the light of the Mediterranean, the light of Apollo, to the darkness of night, the realm of Pluto.

In their creation of a narrative that has much more to do with recollection and memory than what we would call recorded experience, these black-and-white works are more open to ambivalence and oneiric associations, highlighting all the variations and transformations of matter in the absolute contrast between the white of ice and the black of volcanic lava. A contrast, in other words, which underlies a visual reconciliation of opposing parts – as the attempt at a comprehensive sense of lived experience defines a space in which opposites converge in a poetic blending and merging.

Thalea Stefanidou

Art Historian and Critic - Curator