FRED BOISSONAS AND THE PERSONIFICATION OF EPIRUS
The photograph attached to this Diatribe, is by far the most striking and most evocative portrait I have ever seen. It is, put simply, a work of art. For in portraying what seemingly is a village woman in natural habitat, the photographer has in fact, captured the essence, nay personified the Greek region of Epirus.
Like almost all geographical regions, Epirus, is given the female gender by the Greek language, as is the subject in the photograph. Epirus forms a very ancient component of the Greek identity. It is the Ur-heimat from which, according to Greek mythology, the Greek tribes migrated into the rest of the country. As a result, it was known as Αρχέγονος Ελλάς, by the geographer Strabon and in the consciousness of the Greeks, always remained the wild, uncompromising, semi-barbarous but ultimately ever faithful ancestral repository of their identity.
The terrain of Epirus is overwhelmingly harsh and mountainous, stark and bleak. In fact, it is an area of extreme infertility, whose inhabitants have barely managed over the centuries, to coax enough plants out of the barren soil in order to subsist. As a result, they have grown hardy and stubborn, resourceful and indomitable, wilful yet patient, strong yet ever vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature that seem to blight their lives with depressing constancy.
As a result, few of the folk songs of Epirus ever raise themselves above a basic level of despondency. The Epirots are perhaps the only people in the world who begin their celebrations with funeral dirges, lamenting lost loved ones, lost opportunities, lost dreams and even lost homelands. For the harsh and brutish conditions prevailing in Epirus have from the time of the genesis of the Greek people, have caused them to abandon that region since time immemorial, in search of a better life. Nonetheless, the Epirot male always remained tied to his ancestral homeland, returning to procreate, then to relocate male sons to the family business and finally, after a life of roaming in ξενιτιά φαρμακωμένη, returning to die. Epirot women on the other hand, were left at home to battle the elements, along with often precarious political and social circumstances, relying on their own ingenuity, and overseas handouts from their menfolk in order to survive. Epirots are thus stone-reared, and can survive anything.
One can see all this, and much more in the photograph. Against a whitewashed, stark stone background, constructed of the same stones as the brooding mountains of Epirus, stands an Epirot woman. Next to her, there is a hint of a window, yet it looks out onto nothing and its bars provide neither hope of insight or escape. Her stooped and wearied stance denotes that of an old woman. If this is the case then the baby crib or "sarmanitsa," as it is known in the Epirotic patois, with all its connotations of fertility, comes in stark juxtaposition to its bearer, who manifestly is beyond child-bearing age. It is then, a pictorial poem of aridity, the negation of creativity. Most masterfully, the photographer does not actually reveal to us the actual age of the woman in question. On closer inspection, it is plausible that she is not old, just wretched and weighed down by the almost unbearable burdens of her existence as a female in Epirus, where again the sarmanitsa constitutes a powerful symbol, not only of her social position but also of hope for the future.
As if to show the inevitable peripatetic nature of the Epirotic condition, the woman is photographed just as she appears to go on a journey. Her satchel strapped across her, she pauses and places her head in her hands. Is she abandoning her home owing to the death of a family member or the destruction of her home? After all this photo was taken in 1913, in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars that both liberated and devastated Epirus. Or is she being compelled to abandon her home due to the overriding poverty of her day to day existence? We cannot tell. All we know is that in capturing her, in a very human moment, the necessity of fleeing is paused to give way to despondency, the photographer achieves a most remarkable feat. In obscuring her face, he removes from his subject her personal identity. She could be anyone. She is in fact, the everywoman of her time, giving way to her emotions but stoically enduring, persisting and moving on, in mute suffering, as generations of her ancestors have done before her. When I look at her, it is as if I can see my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother and hear the sighs of every single other Epirot woman I have ever known. I have seen no other depiction that so evokes a place or a people, so effectively.
The photographer possessed with such gifts of perception, was the Swiss born Fred Boissonnas, a descendant of an eminent dynasty of photographers, who from 1903 when he first came to Greece, up until the year of his death in 1946, became enraptured by the country and its heritage and determined to provide a extensive photographic record of the aspects of Greek life that most enthralled him. Thus, for more than thirty years, Boissonnas proved to be an unlikely but passionate ambassador of Greece, not only in the guise of a photographer but also as a writer, illustrator and publisher of books with themes taken from Greece.
With his rare sensibility and his unique photographic techniques, he revealed and promoted to Europe and the rest of the world, Greece's bright landscapes, the glorious ancient monuments and the vivid everyday life during the first decades of the twentieth century. Fascinatingly enough, it is an often neglected fact that the peripatetic Fred Boissonnas, along with native Greeks Christos Kakalos and Daniel Baud-Bovy were the first persons to ascend the highest peak of Mount Olympus, a feat that took place as late as in 1914.
His fascination for the ever changing landscapes and diversity of lifestyles steeped in a rich tradition and stoic autarky compelled Fred Boissonnas to extensively explore Greece from the Peloponnese to Crete, Ithaca to Epirus and Olympus to the Holy Mountain. Through photos and albums he presents a panorama of Greece during the interwar period, helping to shape a sympathetic European public opinion of the poor and harried country during the same period. Some of the photographs are remarkable in that they capture demographic realities that no longer exist. Boissonas' photographs of Paramythia constitute key sociological evidence of the Albanian Cham minority in western Epirus, prior to their alliance with the occupying powers and the massacres they perpetrated, which compelled them to leave the region. Similarly, Boissonas' photographs of Athens, displaying a bucolic landscape of empty, open fields, dominated by a brooding Parthenon, truly are works of art, as is his photo of rain pooling into puddles on the Parthenon floor. And then of course there is the personification of Epirus....
Quote apart from his interest in recording edifices that would eventually disappear, Boissonas gave us a picture of Greece that extends beyond the portrayal of the tangible, in order to capture an ethos and a singular attitude to life. One can only wonder, whether a modern day photographer, travelling through just a diverse land, so many years of tribulation later, would be as sufficiently moved as Fred Boissonas to exclaim affectionately about his subjects:
"These people, both on the coast and further inland, the fisherman, the farmer, the shepherd, all these people have such a brilliant mind, so much kindness, so much passion for freedom. Such a cult of the past, such a dedication to ancient habits ... " I for one, would like to think that they would. For Boissonas' photographs are evidence enough, that some things never change.
Like almost all geographical regions, Epirus, is given the female gender by the Greek language, as is the subject in the photograph. Epirus forms a very ancient component of the Greek identity. It is the Ur-heimat from which, according to Greek mythology, the Greek tribes migrated into the rest of the country. As a result, it was known as Αρχέγονος Ελλάς, by the geographer Strabon and in the consciousness of the Greeks, always remained the wild, uncompromising, semi-barbarous but ultimately ever faithful ancestral repository of their identity.
The terrain of Epirus is overwhelmingly harsh and mountainous, stark and bleak. In fact, it is an area of extreme infertility, whose inhabitants have barely managed over the centuries, to coax enough plants out of the barren soil in order to subsist. As a result, they have grown hardy and stubborn, resourceful and indomitable, wilful yet patient, strong yet ever vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature that seem to blight their lives with depressing constancy.
As a result, few of the folk songs of Epirus ever raise themselves above a basic level of despondency. The Epirots are perhaps the only people in the world who begin their celebrations with funeral dirges, lamenting lost loved ones, lost opportunities, lost dreams and even lost homelands. For the harsh and brutish conditions prevailing in Epirus have from the time of the genesis of the Greek people, have caused them to abandon that region since time immemorial, in search of a better life. Nonetheless, the Epirot male always remained tied to his ancestral homeland, returning to procreate, then to relocate male sons to the family business and finally, after a life of roaming in ξενιτιά φαρμακωμένη, returning to die. Epirot women on the other hand, were left at home to battle the elements, along with often precarious political and social circumstances, relying on their own ingenuity, and overseas handouts from their menfolk in order to survive. Epirots are thus stone-reared, and can survive anything.
One can see all this, and much more in the photograph. Against a whitewashed, stark stone background, constructed of the same stones as the brooding mountains of Epirus, stands an Epirot woman. Next to her, there is a hint of a window, yet it looks out onto nothing and its bars provide neither hope of insight or escape. Her stooped and wearied stance denotes that of an old woman. If this is the case then the baby crib or "sarmanitsa," as it is known in the Epirotic patois, with all its connotations of fertility, comes in stark juxtaposition to its bearer, who manifestly is beyond child-bearing age. It is then, a pictorial poem of aridity, the negation of creativity. Most masterfully, the photographer does not actually reveal to us the actual age of the woman in question. On closer inspection, it is plausible that she is not old, just wretched and weighed down by the almost unbearable burdens of her existence as a female in Epirus, where again the sarmanitsa constitutes a powerful symbol, not only of her social position but also of hope for the future.
As if to show the inevitable peripatetic nature of the Epirotic condition, the woman is photographed just as she appears to go on a journey. Her satchel strapped across her, she pauses and places her head in her hands. Is she abandoning her home owing to the death of a family member or the destruction of her home? After all this photo was taken in 1913, in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars that both liberated and devastated Epirus. Or is she being compelled to abandon her home due to the overriding poverty of her day to day existence? We cannot tell. All we know is that in capturing her, in a very human moment, the necessity of fleeing is paused to give way to despondency, the photographer achieves a most remarkable feat. In obscuring her face, he removes from his subject her personal identity. She could be anyone. She is in fact, the everywoman of her time, giving way to her emotions but stoically enduring, persisting and moving on, in mute suffering, as generations of her ancestors have done before her. When I look at her, it is as if I can see my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother and hear the sighs of every single other Epirot woman I have ever known. I have seen no other depiction that so evokes a place or a people, so effectively.
The photographer possessed with such gifts of perception, was the Swiss born Fred Boissonnas, a descendant of an eminent dynasty of photographers, who from 1903 when he first came to Greece, up until the year of his death in 1946, became enraptured by the country and its heritage and determined to provide a extensive photographic record of the aspects of Greek life that most enthralled him. Thus, for more than thirty years, Boissonnas proved to be an unlikely but passionate ambassador of Greece, not only in the guise of a photographer but also as a writer, illustrator and publisher of books with themes taken from Greece.
With his rare sensibility and his unique photographic techniques, he revealed and promoted to Europe and the rest of the world, Greece's bright landscapes, the glorious ancient monuments and the vivid everyday life during the first decades of the twentieth century. Fascinatingly enough, it is an often neglected fact that the peripatetic Fred Boissonnas, along with native Greeks Christos Kakalos and Daniel Baud-Bovy were the first persons to ascend the highest peak of Mount Olympus, a feat that took place as late as in 1914.
His fascination for the ever changing landscapes and diversity of lifestyles steeped in a rich tradition and stoic autarky compelled Fred Boissonnas to extensively explore Greece from the Peloponnese to Crete, Ithaca to Epirus and Olympus to the Holy Mountain. Through photos and albums he presents a panorama of Greece during the interwar period, helping to shape a sympathetic European public opinion of the poor and harried country during the same period. Some of the photographs are remarkable in that they capture demographic realities that no longer exist. Boissonas' photographs of Paramythia constitute key sociological evidence of the Albanian Cham minority in western Epirus, prior to their alliance with the occupying powers and the massacres they perpetrated, which compelled them to leave the region. Similarly, Boissonas' photographs of Athens, displaying a bucolic landscape of empty, open fields, dominated by a brooding Parthenon, truly are works of art, as is his photo of rain pooling into puddles on the Parthenon floor. And then of course there is the personification of Epirus....
Quote apart from his interest in recording edifices that would eventually disappear, Boissonas gave us a picture of Greece that extends beyond the portrayal of the tangible, in order to capture an ethos and a singular attitude to life. One can only wonder, whether a modern day photographer, travelling through just a diverse land, so many years of tribulation later, would be as sufficiently moved as Fred Boissonas to exclaim affectionately about his subjects:
"These people, both on the coast and further inland, the fisherman, the farmer, the shepherd, all these people have such a brilliant mind, so much kindness, so much passion for freedom. Such a cult of the past, such a dedication to ancient habits ... " I for one, would like to think that they would. For Boissonas' photographs are evidence enough, that some things never change.
DEAN KALIMNIOU
First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 January 2012
posted by PANEPIROTIC FEDERATION OF AUSTRALIA at Saturday, January 28, 2012
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