Yiannis Hadjiaslanis is well known in the Urbanautica community, George Salameh has interviewed him a while back and you can read this interview on our page.
Hadjiaslanis has a new book coming out on early October, entitled Drive and he kindly asked us to review it. Some basic stuff to begin with: The book is printed in Athens in 2018, there are 200 copies with 56 pages, on 150 grams paper and we can find 36 colour images in it. The book is entirely self-published and you can pre-order your copy by contacting the artist himself through his website. At the end of the book you can find an interview the artist has given concerning his project. It’s a little bonus which helps us comprehend the concept of the book while providing food for further thinking on photography subjects.
When you start looking through Drive what first catches your eye are the empty streets full of colour. No people around, or even if they are there, they can be spot in a significant distance, hidden by the shadows the sun is creating. On a first impression the reader thinks he is somewhere in Midwestern USA, but that is not the case since the images were taken in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Hadjiaslanis visited the city and decided to photograph it. Highly inspired by the New Topographic Movement he found familiarities in the South African landscape with the American landscape and somehow the field did not feel so off, so strange, so new. Johannesburg is considered an unsafe city and this feeling of fear is quite obvious in the images. Cameras, fences, bars seem to provide some kind of protection to civilians from evil subjects. Where is the violence coming from and to whom is it addressed is a question that comes to mind, and the images in the book evoke that question quite eloquently, pushing the reader to some personal research concerning the South African city. In some of the images, vegetation has taken over abandoned buildings, creating a feeling of desertion and abandonment; resulting in a demonstration about the power of nature over human activity. Hadjiaslanis explains that even though he was warned by friends and heard a number of personal stories of random violence himself, he never encountered danger in his journey around the city. But then again…he was driven around the city or drove himself, chose the spots, took the pictures, moved on. So he named the book Drive and that is an honest title explaining his point of view. The images concentrate on commercial roads, intersections, nodes and residential areas around the city. His concept focuses on the idea of the visitor experiencing a slight glimpse of the whole and just scratching the surface of the structure on this place on earth.
Composing the images in a way that the eye cannot escape the blue sky dominating over the city, Hadjiaslanis seeks to highlight this feeling of flatness in the cityscape. The city extends to a far end and it is always crowned by the strong light, resulting in bright and colourful, strong images. One cannot escape this hard light and since the artist is after all a visitor, he demonstrates in his work his impression of how the city looks like, how its people go about their everyday lives, on how the urbanism is organised and from that point of view his work is a sincere compilation of images right on spot!
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