THE 15TH RPS GRANTEE PANOS KEFALOS

03/16/2017

We are pleased to announce that Panos Kefalos’ proposal ‘saints’ has been selected as the 15th grantee of Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant from 2016 December deadline submissions selected by our five commissioned judges,Peggy Sue Amison, Marie Lelievre, Enrico Bossan, Teun van der Heijden and Dean Chapman.
We are now scheduling his exhibition in 2018, more news later!

©Panos Kefalos / the 15th RPS grantee

Saints Why ‘saints’?
The correlation between the title of my book and its subject matter is not an obvious one.
I chose the word ‘Saints’ because, to me, it is the signifier of a spiritual search.
What I was looking for with my work was a missing spiritual connection: something linking me with the people portrayed in these photos, or linking them with my city, or me with the lingering shadow of my past.
In the fall of 2012, my involvement in an unrelated work brought me to Victoria Square, in downtown Athens.
In these early stages my goal was to capture the everyday life of the children – most of them refugees from Afghanistan – that worked and played on the square. It quickly became about much more than that.
It became about childhood – that broken mirror image of adult life – and the forces tearing it apart: fragility and unconstrained freedom, the brutal violence of war and the instinctive expression of child’s play.
The Saint is he who opens to the sinner the way to atonement and transcendence.
The bond I formed with three of the children and their families released a tension that took away all my innermost fears.
I’m afraid it might sound a little self-centered, but that is how I looked at their world: through my own eyes.
By delving into intimate feelings and personal truths, the memories and primeval impulses that struggled inside me to reach the surface were suddenly free to pour forth.
These photos don’t tell any stories. They are a free association of images, reflections of the way I felt about our encounter.
By 2015 all the people I knew had left Greece.
I documented the refugee crisis that broke out in August of that year: surrounded by TV Channels and photojournalists from all over the world, I took my last pictures.
It was a time for international headlines – personal journeys and friendships seemed now out of fashion.
A few days later I decided the time had come to commit this experience into the book I had been planning and I finally left for Italy to edit it.

©Panos Kefalos / the 15th RPS grantee

About Panos Kefalos Panos Kefalos was born in Athens in 1990.
He has studied cinematography at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos and photography at I.E.K. AKMI.
He has collaborated, as cameraman and director of photography, in independent short films that were selected and awarded by international film festivals in Greece and abroad.
He has also worked with video artists and performers and he has participated, as a videomaker, to the organization of the 3rd Athens Biennale Monodrome 2011.
As a photographer he presented his first personal exhibition, “Entropia”, in 2011.
He has afterwards taken part in group exhibitions and he was selected in 2013 to be presented at the Athens Photo Festival in the Young Greek Photographers section.
In 2014 he was shortlisted for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
In November of 2012 he started his project “Saints”, which was completed in late of 2015 and was supported by Fabrica.
In the period between September and October of 2015 he completed his residency at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy where his first photobook, “saints.”, was created.
It was published in July of 2016.
“Saints” got selected by Jurors’ picks for the LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2016. In 2017 he won the Gomma Grant 2016 Best Black & White Picture award and “saints.” got selected as one of the Top 14 Photobooks of 2016 for the LensCultute list.
http://www.panoskefalos.com/

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