ελληνικά

"The myths of rocks"

Alexandros Vrettakos

With the cooperation of the National Bank Cultural Foundation (M.I.E.T.) - Bookstore

5 - 23 October

How did “The myths of rocks” came to light

Sometimes life can be just accidental. As a matter of fact that’s how I started my portfolio concerning shapes of rocks. Spending hours in front of my computer screen, I found out, with the help of symmetry, that some photographs could hide strange mythological shapes. It was that particular moment when I felt both an instantaneous fear but at the same time an interest to go on by photographing rocks around my city of Kozani . Through this photographical trip I had the chance to come across areas with special interest, areas which were magical.

I was able to see huge rocks being located in totally unnatural spots, abandoned quarries like wounds of mountains that were never healed, broken stones being returned to their natural environment and then treated by the rain as a mother who cares about her children, and hidden lakes in ravines or hills that can’t be easily seen.

All these shapes which occur through symmetry can be totally harmonized with the Greek mythology concerning Titanes, Giants, Cyclops and Ekatochires. “No matter how hard earth was begging sky to let her children free, his answer was that he didn’t want any monsterous children, Even if she would gave birth to more children, they would have the same fate…he would throw them to Tartara!”

When I started looking at these rocks I found out how vulnerable and small I am towards them, as a human being, history and material. There are times feeling that these rocks have offered me those spectacular shapes as a reward to the time I offered them.

Alexandros Vrettakos was born in 1964 in Kozani, where he still lives. He works as a sports teacher in secondary education and as basketball coach. He studied photography in Novi-Sad , Serbia from 1986 till 1989. In the ’90 he taught Photography in courses organized by the Perfecture of Kozani (NELE) and in Institutes for Further Education also in Kozani. In 2002 he founded in collaboration with the Municipality of Kozani the Photography Group “Photodiodos”, where he still teaches analog as well as digital photography. He has done sixteen personal exhibitions. He mainly prefers black and white photography. Street photography is the kind of photography that inspires him as far as it concerns his topics. He develops and prints his pictures on his own, because he believes that the photographing process only ends when the final picture is printed on the paper. He doesn’t intervene digitally in his pictures; he only uses his hands in the darkroom to have the desirable results for his pictures. He has been working on digital photography since 2002, where he has been experimenting, in order to understand better its potential. He continues at the same time classical anthropocentrical street  photography, as it was presented by photographers of the last century, because he firmly believes that life is somewhere out there, between skies and oceans, mountains and roads, where man meets the light!