What was your first memory with photography? How did your interest in photography starts out? Tell us about your photographic educational path and how or if architecture studies had an impact on your narrative?
Stefania Orfanidou (SO): As a child we were traveling a lot with my family, taking pictures from the places we visited. I think that my first memory regarding photography is seeing these pictures on the walls of our house, as decorative elements. By that time, my perception about photography would stop on the images of National Geographic and in my mind, it was always connected with journeys to different cultures and exotic lands. It was only after the age of 19, while studying at the faculty of Architecture in Thessaloniki, that I discovered that photography is something much more than depicting different cultures in distant places. The key to my decision to delve into contemporary photography came in Madrid in 2011, when I entered for six months in the Faculty of Fine Arts as an Erasmus student and I attended the Photography course. Madrid by that time was so prolific in terms of artistic movement and exhibitions, that gradually a photographic seed was settled inside me. Back in Thessaloniki, I followed full courses at Stereosis Photography School, and it was only by 2015 that I felt like finding slowly my own way, doing my first step with the body of work Jaguar Sun. The connection of architecture with photography would start by that period and it would continue partially till today, in a lateral way. I definitely owe to architecture the curiosity of observing things around me. Yet, for me, the most important impact of the academic environment was the terrain of theoretical research and background that it provided for many of my photographic projects.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Pendulum'
Tell us more about your first series Jaguar Sun and Cold Turkey and how do you relate to them and why do you consider them complimentary works.
SO: Jaguar Sun was my first photographic series related to the perception of intimacy. The idea came to me while reading The Poetics of Space, a book by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who refers to the phenomenology of the space, in other words in the way we are perceiving the things around us. The period I started working on this project I found out that I was repelled by the noise of the urban environment and I preferred experimenting in the interior of houses or during friends' gatherings. In these cases, I always felt prevalent the sense of familiarity and the convenience of shooting even more personal moments. The result was a collection of objects, details and portraits that reflected the most bright and serene feelings I would feel that period. In October 2015 I self-published Jaguar Sun in very few copies, mostly as a dummy to be given to the people that contributed to its implementation. At the same time, though, there was a part inside me that wasn't that joyful or happy. Cold Turkey, my next project, was born by the need to express my 'darker' feelings, such as pain, loneliness and the sense of loss. It came as an idea a couple of months before I completed Jaguar Sun and it derived from personal unpleasant situations. It also coincided with my movement to -the half-abandoned and destroyed by an earthquake- city of L'Aquila in central Italy. The title itself is an idiomatic expression in English that refers to the abrupt cessation of substance dependence and its subsequent consequences on the organism.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Cold Turkey'
'Pendulum' your new book just came out, tell us more about the backstage of this adventure in L’Aquila, Italy, and your relationship to this place and how it became a body of work before you decide to self-publish it.
SO: I moved to L'Aquila in November 2015. It was a very transitional period of my life, just a few months after my diploma in Architecture, where I had no idea of my next destination. My only concern by then was to escape from Thessaloniki and to find a decent job. In L'Aquila I had an open invitation from a family friend to collaborate with him as an architect on the reconstruction of the city. After second thoughts, I accepted the offer. This was my third visit to L'Aquila. My relationship with this place started 12 years before I was born when my parents met each other there during their studies. I grew up with their stories and I visited the city twice before the devastating earthquake of 2009. What I faced there upon my arrival, 6 years after the disaster, was the absence of life and a strange silence at the heart of a place that was once vivid and 'normal'. The sense of familiarity I had developed all these years in my childhood memory collided with the uncanny new condition the city was in. The trauma on the body of the city was so strong that caused a rupture in my memory. The healing of this rupture came gradually during long walks on the narrow abandoned streets or during work time, on the sites that were under (re)construction. I started capturing photographically the imprints and the aftermath of the earthquake, in the beginning in a spontaneous way and afterward with more consciousness. This procedure functioned as a re-writing of the place's memory in my mind, as a personal quest to restore my relationship with L'Aquila. It was only after my departure from there that I realized that this journey had been a return to my fictitious roots. The Pendulum book was the next step, another chapter, a personal need to materialize in the form of an object this journey. It took me more than three years of excavating through my archive and editing it before I decided to self-publish it in 200 copies.
© Book Pendulum by Stefania Orfanidou, self-published 2019
Any mentor, teacher or anybody else that has had an impact on how you understand your work?
SO: My main mentors in photography where Kosmas Pavlidis and Stratos Kalafatis in the early years and Nikos Markou some years later. In the present, I think that my perception on the way I understand my work constantly is changing and evolving year by year, due to various stimuli that also include fruitful conversations with friends from the photographic and musical environment.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Pendulum'
Is there any contemporary artist, writer, musician or photographer that influenced you in any way?
SO: The japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi and the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard where the first source of inspiration for my first project Jaguar Sun. They both evoke the sense of familiarity, delight and poetry in a very subtle way that was really inspiring for me. I also think that music has had an impact on me all these years. Lately, I would consider the qualities of the music produced by Bill Evans, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ko Ishikawa, and Giorgos Varoutas, closer to what I would like to capture photographically. In terms of constructing a narration, I would make a clear reference to the book Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar. I read it last summer and it was one of the most beautiful and inspiring books I have read so far. Finally, I would include the film Last year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais and the documentary Sans Soleil by Chris Marker.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Jaguar Sun'
You have a peculiar way to choose your project titles, when you start a new one you already have an idea of where you’re going, or do you let yourself be guided by experimentation, by the process itself.
SO: Usually there is a faint idea of the direction I want to follow photographically, but the strategy in finding the subject or the title of each body of work is not clear from the beginning. Sometimes already exists in my mind an idea that stems from the lived experience of personal situations or from academic, historical and philosophical readings. In other cases, the idea emerges during working on something else or just experimenting on things that attract me, seemingly without a purpose. For example, Jaguar Sun came as a quest of capturing the traces of intimacy and its theoretical background was inspired through my architectural courses. Its title, though, came much later, while reading the short story Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino. On my next projects, sometimes the title would precede the project, giving a glimpse of inspiration of what would follow; such as the body of work Cold Turkey or Cache, the most recent one.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Jaguar Sun'
You have changed frame recently with your more recent series Cache one of your most experimental photographic works, tell us more about it and how did you come to this decision? And how this phrase: Our memories are dreams, the house of the past has become a great image, the image of the lost intimacy. by Gaston Bachelard, you used in your first series resonates with Cache.
SO: I think there is an invisible thread that unites all of my works that almost every project is born as an idea from its previous one, as a silent continuation of it. Cache in computing refers to the components that store data so that future requests can be served faster. It is a place where memory is kept well hidden. In my case, Cache is a project that delves into the state of semi-consciousness by collecting inexplicable fragments of memory, that linger in the in-between reality and imagination. I try to recompose these fragments and create a new memory, a 'residual' archive in which familiar images that were suppressed in the subconscious are being recalled back. The sense of familiarity, imagination, memory and oblivion is something that attracts me more with the passage of time. The loss of time and the absence of a specific location helps me to create my own narration, to construct a different place where the beautiful and the ugly may coexist peacefully. The change of frame was part of a need I felt the last two years to escape from the narrow frame of 1:1 and change the 'square' perception of my mind to something ampler.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Cache'
Do you have any comments on how photography has been or is evolving in Greece? Is there anything you have observed in particular in your generation since you are participating in a retrospective exhibition Young Greek Photographers | 2010-2018 at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography?
SO: I think that in each period there are certain tendencies. I believe that somehow there are patterns that from time to time emerge in the surface as a lighthouse for the term “contemporary” and they become repetitive in almost all the artistic works. In my opinion, some of these patterns are the deconstruction of an image, its decontextualization, the collages in digital or analogical form, the experimentation with more time-demanding ways of printing or even the way of narrating a story. These are just a few examples that I observe more intensely in the new generation of photographers and it doesn't mean that only these patterns characterize contemporary photography. The bet in the use and creative reproduction of these patterns is each time the artist's intention to produce a piece of art, and by meaning intention I refer also to the lived experience of the artist while working on it. When the real intention is not present, the technical impeccability of an image based on an unstable generic concept, cannot transmit any feeling because it lacks its soul. And this is the main weakness that I observe in many emerging photographers. Nevertheless, at the same time, I observe important steps made by Greek photographers, who experiment with their own limits and create projects that reflect or hide discreetly a deeper inwardness.
© Installation view of Stefania Orfanidou's work for the exhibition Young Greek Photographers: 2010 - 2018 at MOMus – Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki in collaboration with Athens Photo Festival
How do you deal with the exhibition of your works? Also is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
SO: Until now, I would take in consideration the available space of exhibition -on the wall- and its particular characteristics and based on that I would adopt the size and the composition of my images. On my ongoing project Cache, though, I plan to change this parameter and present the images in another way using the three dimensions of space in such a way that the whole project could be more interactive. I haven't worked on its details yet, but it is a thought I am processing the last months. It is somehow my need to experiment in a different way and combine for the first time the perception of the 'architectural' space with my most experimental project so far.
© Stefania Orfanidou from the series 'Cache'
Since you have a special relationship with photography books, please can you recommend three?
I have no favorite top three, but for different reasons, I would recommend the books Hidden Kingdom by Stefan Bladh, Illuminance by Rinko Kawauchi and Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.
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