Parallel Crisis

Empty advertising billboard

Ancient soldiers in cellophane

Embalbed tiger

Portrait of Daphne

A couple

Entrapped dolphin

Blockade defining an immigrant camp

Group portrait in front of Acropolis

Soldier returning home

An illegal exchange

The jungle

Home of a homeless woman

Street scene: tear gas

Group portrait: the squad

Former Greek Telecommunications Organisation SA

Dog looking through the glass

Window’s reflection

Clouds

Hardcover

116 pages

19 X 27

Photographs: Yannis Karpouzis

Design: Ioannis Markakis

Texts by: Moritz Neumuller, Yannis Karpouzis

Printed by: Kostopoulos printing house

Published by: Empty Square

With the support of Greek Ministry of Culture

June 2021

ISBN 978-618-84981-0-5

Last copies!!

Regular cover price: 43€ (+shipping)

Black cover limited (+ small print): 58€ (+shipping)

To order the book send an email to johnykarpou@gmail.com

or reach our Distribution Points:

Athens: HYPER HYPO

Thessaloniki: Museum of Photography

Madrid: La Fabrica

Reykjavik: Prent and Vinir

This project was awarded:
The Descubrimientos prize PHotoEspana 2015
Athens Photo Festival Portfolio Review 2016

Exhibitions:

PhotoEspana 2016
Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award 2016

Med photo 1

Photobeijin 2016

Benaki Museum – Deste foundation – New Museum of New York

Athens photo festival 2017

PH Museum – Which Europe
Photobook Week Aarhus Dummy Award 2018

Photo Bienalle – Thessaloniki contemporary art museum

Short description

Each animal is defined by a blow

Heracletus, late 6th century BCE.

After the year 2010, a destructive financial crisis has struck Greece, dismantling an already wrecked social balance and driving the population into a state of collective depression. A condition of stagnation is ruling the capital city of Athens.The project Parallel Crisis is a creative document that addresses the ways in which the Medium of Photography is capable of describing this socio-economic event. An uneasy affinity develops between the property of photography to produce events of immobilized time and the negation of social time that widespread crisis instigates. What photography is really recording in Greece is a certain condition of numbness: subjects without the possibility of development, crippling unemployment, confined migrants, neighborhoods reigned by silence and fear. In these conditions, the Medium suspends time that has already been stalled. Photography itself is conceived as a metaphor, a mirror of the financial crisis. Even further, the immobilized time of Photography intersects with the negated time of its subjects (referents). Parallel Crisis is in the end a project about a relation. The relation between a social crisis and a still image (a photograph).

[From epilogue]

Photography’s main shortfall – the inherent inferiority of photographic representation to its real-life counterpart – seemed like the ideal metaphor for a life falling short. The medium’s time-freezing quality, photography’s primary expressive means, perfectly matched the socio-econimcal crisis. In 2011, I started exploring these ideas. The book’s subjects are as frozen in time as their portrayals. They are stuck in a limbo outside the flow of time, waiting to resume their motion but in vain. The square frame describes both their prison and the fragmentary, traumatic circumstance.

Meanwhile, fear crept in everywhere, and Athens had turned into a wasteland. Obliterating a country’s economy takes more than a series of unconstitutional provisions; it also requires heavy police presence, brutal crackdowns, misanthropic ideas disseminated by the Media, adherence to the TINA (There is no alternative) principle, and free rein to the worst social elements, neo-Nazis, infesting the slums with their hate squads.

All these are not present in this book; the reader will have to read between the abandoned billboards.