Why am I taking pictures? Since there is nothing left to be said or seen. Why am I bothered since after Andy Warhol’s tomato soup, everything is potentially art?

Since childhood I remember myself wanting to stand out. To be different. I grew up on the edge at a time when this was happening since globalization was still a work in progress. Of course, I copied things I found myself liking, dressing up like famous musicians and even mimicking their attitudes.  

I think the second big shock, after adolescence itself, is the discovery that you can’t change the world.  

And the third shock is that everything is, and it will be the same, everything is a copy and reimagining of certain – theoretically successful – looks, constructions, lifestyles, fashion, culture and subculture. This spectrum runs from left space and liberalism, to subculture, subcultures, the underground and interpersonal relations.

Therefore, I attempted to copy and show a massive experience of life itself, an open conundrum of a city.

So, I used to spend a lot of time in London, and because of its size, it’s ideal to see the totalitarianism of capitalism. I was wandering around and taking photos. Along the way, I have come to understand, or rather feel, that everything around us is made up of repeating patterns that silently overwhelm us and take over the space around us and ourselves.

Influenced by the basic principles of Andy Warhol as well as by the ancient philosopher Plato, who said that the artist is two times removed from reality (there is the idea, there is a copy of it, which is the object, and the artist imitates this object) I try to reproduce the world as a phenomenon of seeing, as a massive experience of seeing and as a repeatable noise that we are consuming and at the same time this black hole of information is consuming us.

The industrial background, advertisements, people, friends, neighbors, and nightlife are all part of the system, and the system has patterns. Do this, do that, dress like this, walk like that, consume. Earn money. Spent money. Earn some more money. Spent some more money. Repeat.

I am reproducing this repetition and similarity between things, humans, and ideas in this project: the idea that we are all the same in a wrong way, the idea that we are turning into nobodies.

And to answer the opening question, this is why I take photographs, to show this system, to show this problem. These images in a sequential play try to emphasize our effort to be different and the inevitable result of being nobodies. It is a very large project, with close to 500 images that are repeated periodically on contact sheets, having as a saving board some industrial landscapes or some images that exaggerate this feeling. It is a black hole of images that are taking part in an urban situation.

KOSTIS ARGYRIADIS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kostis Argyriadis is a photographer born in 1981 in Thessaloniki, Greece. He attended ESP Photography with a scholarship. He studied under Stratos Kalafatis.

He published his first book, Every Day, Every City, with Agra publications, and the second, DD-MM-YYYY, is self-published. He participated in several published books and photo festivals like ”Thessaloniki: Looking at Time through Moments: Photographs 1900-2017″ at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin, “Festival Circulation(s),” in Paris, “Balkans Today, The Present of a Wounded Landscape” in Athens, “Estate Fotografia Siracusa Festival” in Italy, “Projet 102” in Paris. He has also held solo exhibitions inside and outside Greece.