Yet another semester is underway in the beautiful Aegean Center on spring shining Paros. I wanted to share my final Portfolio from last year. A small but precious to me group of photographs. More of my photography can be viewed on Photography page, that I recently edited.
Burnt Cedar Forest, 2013
Amorgos, 2013
Underwater Sea, 2013
Clouds, 2013
Text by Spyros Skordos. Photo by D.Dimoulitsas. EN mag, issue 3 (spring, 2010), pp. 9 and 11
And a bit of Greek on this blog….
Today is the anniversary of the union of Corfu (and the other Ionian islands) with the modern Greek State (1864). In Corfu town we have a public monument to physically mark this event in our large, green and flowery central town square, the Esplanade. Every year on this day this stone monument gets decorated but for the rest of the year it is left in peace and in darkness for teenage lovers to discover each other, in equal distance between seclusion from and proximity to public life. This monument seems to be sitting comfortably there awaiting them to mark their Union.
Thinking of that a few years ago, when, some dear dear friends of mine – Dionysis Dimoulitsas and Vasso Kotsi, among others – and I were producing a free press magazine about Corfu, called EN, we felt we had to connect those dots. To make a note of this personal and social union. The Spring issue of 2010 would be in circulation during this anniversary, so we asked from our witty editor, Spyros Skordos, to remind us all what ‘The Union” really meant for our Corfiot generation. I am sharing this lively article here. To access it, click on either images (above or below).
The text is in Greek. Whoever can, enjoy it!
ΕΝ magazine, issue 3 (spring 2010), cover. Cover photo by D.Dimoulitsas
For me May Day is a beautiful, extrovert, yet personal celebration.
If we have made it so far, if we have managed to spring anew through the dim winter and the tumultuous coming of spring, then we should celebrate it and accept our rewards of the season’s sheer light, the saturated landscapes or the floating optimism.
This is what we celebrate on May Day. I personally celebrate this and my mom’s birthday, a day which smells of strawberries. But I make a mental note never to miss to ‘dip’ into this happy mood, these memories and the traditional day events because of my grandmother. So I could say that I also celebrate May Day in love for my grandmother.
Some 15 years ago, on May Day, my grandmother had come over to the house so we would go out to pick flowers together and make our wreaths. I had gone out the night before and when I got up late, I was in no mental or physical state to go out searching for flowers. Coordintation and motivation were too demanding skills. My grandmother waited patiently for me to collect myself. Some hours later I asked her to go on her own. Her reply has stayed with me ever since. She said that some days in the calendar year are symbolic, May Day was one of them. She said that missing the symbolism of such days allows for banality to take over our lives. And that is unbearable. So, she insisted in me getting my act together and gift myself with an outstanding day!
My grandmother suffers from Alzheimer’s Desease now and she has no clue May Day just passed or that it is a special day. It is to her I keep a promise ever since, that for as long as I have my wits or strength, I will be celebrating the beauty of life, the outstanding beauty of life.
My new site is up’n’running! It is a site dedicated to the Beauty of the Easter in Corfu and it is titled ‘Easter in Corfu // music in the air’.
Greek Easter is almost here! Coming from Corfu this is a very special time for me. So, since I cannot be in the streets of Corfu this year, listening to its music and smelling the beautiful Spring aromas, I decided to create a digital ‘Homage’ to the Corfiot Easter.
I explain my fascination about the Easter celebration in Corfu at length on the site, so I won’t say much here. But in order to make it clear as to why I felt like sharing the beauty of the Corfiot Easter, I post here my ‘Personal Note‘ originally found on the Easter in Corfu site:
Easter in Corfu is popular and crowded and you might think it’s too much hassle because of that. But I beg to disagree. It is absolutely beautiful, therefore I completely understand the crowds that flock in and I put up with it. People are not crazy for wanting to experience this!
I am Corfiot and I grew up in Corfu. I took part in the Easter processions with my school and the girl guides since I was six up util I was an adult. In my uni years I used to fly back to Corfu just to be part of all this. Having been brought up in a non religious environment, I completely missed the fact that Easter was a religious event, up until the age of 12(!), although, as I said before, I was taking part in the processions. I thought the whole things was a Corfiot way of celebrating Spring and the priests and town churches just tagged along…
That is still more or less my impression of the Corfiot Easter and that is why throughout this site the religious aspect of the celebrations is only mentioned in event or day titles. In other words, through this site you will not find out anything more about Greek Orthodoxy or Christianity for that matter.
As an endnote, let me summarise my intention in sharing my love for the Corfiot Easter with all of you:
Corfiot Easter is an event that makes me feel I have a home that I love. It is a longer than a week festivity that uses all the Corfiot ‘peculiarities’ as essential elements in order for Easter to happen. It needs the coming of Spring in this blossoming island, the European influenced local culture, architecture and love for music. It needs the Greek outward ness, community style of life and pride, to people the whole thing. It needs the ancient rituals to translate into religious festivities. It needs a community which wishes to remember its deceased ones and its past, a community which yearns to celebrate life, a beautiful life ahead of us all.
Daria Koskorou (just days before Corfiot Easter, 2013)
The new, Spring 2013, semester at the Aegean Center has just begun… Inspiration and love for life, art and the craft of life and of art is already perfuming our air. This will be my 5th semester of studying Digital Photography with John Pack and I am more than excited about it. ‘Digital Photography’ is just the focal point in John’s class and it serves as a good title to communicate the medium of study. But his class is so much more than that. It is a class of gratitude. It is a class of poetry. Embedded in his philosophy of learning by sharing, daring, caring and crafting, John takes us on a journey where each one of us, and together as a group, acquire the skills and appetite to capture our inner view within a frame of reference, reveal our subtleties by mastering the tonal vocabulary and sculpt these impressions as images on fine prints.
Ah…and this will be a spring journey…!
Just as I embark on this journey, I thought of sharing my Portofolio from last semester, Fall 2012:
In an earlier post back in April, titled ‘Talking about Art and Devotion’, I was talking about a photograph I was working on, the Rock. At the time of that post I wasn’t happy with my test print. It took me a couple more months of working on it, leaving it aside, looking back at it, making test prints, using different printing methods, etc, to get it to where I felt I liked it. So here it is:
This image was taken using my iphone 4S (!) on a early spring afternoon at the Paros Park in Paros. I processed it in CS5 and my final print was made on a Sommerset Velvet Fine Art A4 paper in Piezo, using a carbon selenium split toning.
I have to say that if you compare the two variations of the same image on a computer screen, I mean the one I have uploaded on the April post and this one here, you might not see much of a difference. The adjustments I made are subtle so the illuminated highly contrasty computer screen might not reveal them, but there is a huge difference in the tonal values between these two versions and, therefore, in the overall feeling of the image on the print(s). I wish I could show you that too.
I had some stuff sent to me from my old apartment in Athens. Opening the boxes and going through all this ‘memorabilia’ I have visited moments of a different life, my life. Among the things there was a printed out email correspondence with a dear friend of mine. We had both moved to new places at the same time, both hoping to get our networking up’n’going so we would get involved soon in projects and work with people we cared about. Talking about these steps, he sent me at the time his idea of my successful (as he saw it) networking strategy. I hate networking! It has a creepy means to an end purpose. But seeing this customised list made me think that, if this is considered a networking approach then I am probably a natural.
So here is Bernhard’s sum up of what could be Daria’s networking tips:
do’s
don’t
'Silverback', by Jun Pierre Shiozawa (© 2012 junpierre)
I am startled by the power, creativity and freedom that imagination gives us access to. Startled not so much because through imagination we can escape reality, but mainly because it functions differently on all individuals but it gives us all the possibility to experience events and emotions, or to explore territories that are normally impossible (or just hard) to reach in our ‘real’ life.
Paper House, detail, by Matej Kren (via flavorpill)
Following my mood for trying something new these days and avoid reverting to my ‘good ol’ habbits’ I spent Easter in Paros for the first time. For the first time, that is, in Greece away from Corfu. Anyone that knows me well understands that this is quite a strange thing to do, since I could easily be called a Corfiot Easter ‘fanatic’. Of course I missed home and how we do Easter there, but I was equally curious and excited to experience a more “Orthodox” Easter that is celebrated in the place I now live.
At Paros I went to watch the main easter do’s at the Ekatontapiliani Church in Parikia (a literal translation in English would be: the Church of a Hundred Doors), a breathtaking monument. The site was originally an ancient temple and a roman gymnasium. In the 4th century AD the Byzantine Emperor Constantine built in its place this Christian church following his mother’s (St. Helen) will. A couple of centuries later, Emperor Justinian restored and enlarged the original structure. It has been operating as a Christian church ever since, that is for a bit more than 1700 years. The architectural style is pure and original byzantine and most of its building materials are a re-use of the ancient pieces of parian marble found on site. In other words, you can read great parts of the history of Paros and of the eastern mediterranean just by sitting there.
So, although my ‘default’ enjoyment of Easter celebrations is heavily, if not exclusively, based on the music and spring colors of Corfu, this too was a beautiful yet very different experience. Easter on Paros is a more obvious religious event than I would fancy these festivities to be and visiting the church during the various easter services didn’t make of me a bearer of hope and light in any religious or dogmatic sense. But I was moved and excited these days by the overall community feel, the beauty of the Ekatontalypiani, the naturalness in everybody’s behaviour in engaging with the rituals, the blossoming of the island, the brightness of the Aegean light and the force of its winds; a combination of elements that created a very specific environment for friends to meet. So I may not have felt any sort of metaphysical transcendence, but I was definitely reminded that symbols and rituals make it easier for us to mark and live the extraordinary.
Last year I travelled to India. I hadn’t planned or dreamed about this trip much, so just as I was on my way there I took some books with me that would hopefully help me make sense of the place. One of those books, apart from being informative, I thought it was also a very delicate and appreciative survey of the fabric(s) that make up this deeply devotional society. The book is titled “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India” by William Dalrymple. Dalrymple is a British (Scotish) travel writer, historian who lives in and obviously loves India. This book is a collection of stories that portray the different religious and spiritual traditions that are active in today’s India. Each story concentrates on specific people and their traditions. His observations and remarks assist you in connecting the dots between what you may see in your travel with the traditions or rituals these manifestations refer to. Of course India is a different experience to different people, but I loved his storytelling style and I felt that it really helped me understand the various heritage inputs that inform the people’s modern life. In India you cannot help it but feel that you are in a place where nothing ceases to exist, while at the same time new approaches are always welcome. Age long regional traditions and norms function hand in hand with modern style interconnectedness, old kingdoms are proud members of the relatively new Republic of India, meditation practices support civil servants’ performance, excellent train services transport people of all ages and castes to far away religious festivals, traffic chaos is met with a grin on drivers’ faces. In that sense spirituality there is almost tangible.
Anyway,when I returned from India, completely blown away from the experience of this country, I selected parts from a story in this book, titled ‘The Maker of Idols’, to share with my Digital Photography class at the Aegean Center. Here are these excerpts in the order I read them out:
In the sculpture of Cholas, and those like Srikanda [sculptor] who have kept its flame alive in the Kaveri Delta ever since …[m]ore than in any other Indian artistic tradition, the gods here are both intensely physical and physically gorgeous. The sensuality of a god was understood as an aspect of his formless perfection and divine inner beauty.
Here the final climax of worship is still to have darshan*: to actually see the beauty of the divine image, and to meet the eyes of the god.
‘We believe that unless these proportions are exactly perfect, the god cannot live in the idol. As sculptors, we struggle to become master craftsmen just so that we can begin to convey the beauty of the deity’… [says Srikanda]
‘Our workshop should be like a temple’, Srikanda said. ‘Every second is holy. Some people think that what we do is an art, but we think of it mainly as an act of devotion. For us art and religion are one: only when there is prayer can the artist make a perfect sculpture.’
‘The idols are reflections of our minds and spirits, so while we are at work on a sculpture we must behave as if we were in a holy temple: we must speak only the truth, and be kind and polite to everyone.’ [says Srikanda]
If the idol was not properly tended to, the jivan* could ebb much earlier, and if stolen or abused, the deity would leave immediately. ‘Such was the case with all the idols in the museums, none of which was now alive.’ [says Srikanda]
‘The god or godess only fully enters a new idol when we open his eyes and carve in the pupils – the final piece of carving – and when the appropriate puja* is performed. This is the most important and most intense moment. I am human: hard as I try, many times when I am carving I think of sales tax, family problems, getting the car repaired. But when the eyes are opened, and the appropriate mantras are chanted, I forget everything. I am lost to the world.’ [says Srikanda]
Glossary:
Darshan: a sighting, a glimpse, or view, especially of an idol of a deity in a temple, or of a holy or eminent personage.
Jivan: life, spirit.
Puja: a religious devotion (‘lit. adoration’).
Author’s italics, my emphasis (bold)
Excerpts and glossary from the book: Nine Lives, In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, 2010, ISBN: 9781408801246
After I finished reading these excerpts in class my teacher, John Pack, told me that this is what he wants to see in my images and work. I have really only felt like that for one image so far, the rock, where I felt that everything is in its place in completeness, allowing me to frame it and process it as an image; for a fine rendering is an act of devotion. I am still not happy with my test print. I will keep on working on the image till it matches what I felt I saw. In other words, this image as a photograph is still in the temple.
escape from a bankrupt state 