Tasos Schizas was born in Athens in 1964, grew up in Tripoli, Libya, and has lived permanently in Thessaloniki since 1982. Since then, photography has been for him a means of artistic expression and creation. He has been teaching photography from 1991 to the present day.
He has taught in public and private photography institutes, in schools of liberal studies, in clubs, and in municipal photography groups in Thessaloniki. Since 2011, he has organised seminars at Kounio Image Space, and since 2020, online seminars through video conferencing.
From 1993 to 1996, he published Glass Eye, a black-and-white photography magazine distributed free of charge in Thessaloniki, which ran for 20 issues.
From 1996 to 2010, he published Photographic Idol, a monographic artistic photography magazine, which ran for 28 issues. He coordinates the photography groups Photoporoi and Phi.
With these groups, he curates and organises Contrast / Antithesis: Thessaloniki Photography Festival. Since 2011, he has also curated and organised exhibitions at Kounio Image Space.
He has been involved in organising exhibitions, lectures, presentations, and seminars. He has written numerous notes, published a series of articles, and presented portfolios in magazines and online.
He has written five books: The Technique of Analogue and Digital Photography, True Lie, The Idol of Music, Teleportraits, and Johatsu / Between.
He has held 21 solo exhibitions and participated in 55 group exhibitions. More information and photographs by Tasos can be found on his website:
http://www.photoeidolo.gr/TassosSchizas.html
Tasos Schizas was born in Athens in 1964, grew up in Tripoli, Libya, and has lived permanently in Thessaloniki since 1982. Since then, photography has been for him a means of artistic expression and creation. He has been teaching photography from 1991 to the present day.
He has taught in public and private photography institutes, in schools of liberal studies, in clubs, and in municipal photography groups in Thessaloniki. Since 2011, he has organised seminars at Kounio Image Space, and since 2020, online seminars through video conferencing.
From 1993 to 1996, he published Glass Eye, a black-and-white photography magazine distributed free of charge in Thessaloniki, which ran for 20 issues.
From 1996 to 2010, he published Photographic Idol, a monographic artistic photography magazine, which ran for 28 issues. He coordinates the photography groups Photoporoi and Phi.
With these groups, he curates and organises Contrast / Antithesis: Thessaloniki Photography Festival. Since 2011, he has also curated and organised exhibitions at Kounio Image Space.
He has been involved in organising exhibitions, lectures, presentations, and seminars. He has written numerous notes, published a series of articles, and presented portfolios in magazines and online.
He has written five books: The Technique of Analogue and Digital Photography, True Lie, The Idol of Music, Teleportraits, and Johatsu / Between.
He has held 21 solo exhibitions and participated in 55 group exhibitions. More information and photographs by Tasos can be found on his website:
http://www.photoeidolo.gr/TassosSchizas.html
1. You have experienced photography through many roles: photographer, educator, publisher, and exhibition curator. Which of these roles has shaped your artistic identity the most, and why?
It is difficult to define. They are all interconnected. Although I photograph without a specific purpose, I often use my photographs in publications or seminars. The reverse also happens: for the needs of a publication or a seminar, I may take certain photographs, and quite often that becomes the starting point for a new body of work.
Curating exhibitions also influences and shapes me, as does every encounter with significant photographic work.
2. You have published photography magazines, curated exhibitions, and coordinated photography groups. How do you think the photographic community of Thessaloniki — and Greece more broadly — has evolved in recent years?
Photography in our country has truly taken off. In the past, the photographic community functioned in a more limited way, mainly on a local level. Today, through the internet, it interacts, evolves, and develops on a global scale.
I often hear complaints about all the rubbish that circulates, and I understand them. The number of photographers has multiplied, and the work we see on social media, websites, in exhibitions, and in publications is overwhelmingly abundant and uncontrolled. But along with the rubbish, worthwhile work has also multiplied. If we compare today with the 1980s, the progress in both quality and quantity is obvious.
3. In your book True Lie, you touch on the idea of photography both as documentation and as the construction of a reality. Where do you place photography between truth and falsehood?
The title of my book, True Lie, sums up my view of photography. It refers to its fabricated truth, combined with our need to see, in every recorded image, a clear reference to reality.No photograph can be absolutely true. The conversion of three dimensions into two, the frame — the cutting of a part from the whole — the frozen and selected moment in time, the reduction of the range of brightness, depth of field, the freezing of motion, and many other factors make even the most “truthful” images become something very different from existing reality. Photography always lies, but it lies in a truthful way.
4. Having worked with both analogue and digital photography, do you believe technology has changed the way photographers tell stories? Or does the essence of the image remain timelessly the same?
Technology alone is not enough to bring about a change in photography. Digital photography can be interventionist, but analogue photography can be just as interventionist. It is worth mentioning that montage was born together with photography itself. Hippolyte Bayard, one of the fathers of photography, whose discovery preceded Daguerre’s, was the first, in 1839, to combine two negatives into one photograph in order to add clouds to another image.
The changes we see are not related simply to changes in technology, but to the tendencies of each era, to the genre of photography, and to the choices of each photographer. If we look at the history of photography, we will see, despite all the changes, a cycle that repeats itself.
5. If you could pass on only one lesson to a young photographer — something you consider fundamental to the art of photography — what would it be?
Authenticity is the most important thing for today’s artist. Everything has already been done and is often repeated. The only thing that stands out is personal expression. It is good to listen to and trust our heart. If we add education and practice to that, we will be able to express ourselves better.
DIARY OF LIGHT
Diary of Light emerged as an idea for an exercise and a process when I created an Instagram account in September 2016. I thought of setting myself the goal of making one post a day, with the common theme of light at play.
I kept it up without interruption, mainly with new photographic material, and completed 200 posts, which still remain deep in my profile.
Here, a selection of 27 photographs is presented.
