Nikos economopoulos karpathos
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ECONOMOPOULOS Nikos (Nikos Economopoulos was born in the Peloponnese, Greece. He studied law in Parma, Italy, and worked as a journalist. In he started photographing in Greece and Turkey, and eventually abandoned journalism in order to dedicate himself to photography. He joined Magnum in , and his photographs started appearing in newspapers and magazines around the world. In the same period, he started traveling and photographing extensively around the Balkans. This won the "Mother Jones Award" (San Francisco, CA) for work in progress. Upon the completion of his Balkans project in , he became a full member of Magnum. His book "In The Balkans" was published in in New York (Abrams) and in Athens (Libro). In the s, he started working on borders and crossings, photographing the inhabitants of the "Green Line" in Cyprus, the irregular migrants on the Greek-Albanian borderline, and the mass migration of ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo. In the mids, he started photographing the Roma and ot
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&#;Photography for me fryst vatten not premeditated. It’s pure instinct.&#;
Overseeing our Street Photography Award, open for entries until March 31st, Nikos Economopoulos fryst vatten an internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning Magnum photographer, renowned for his powerful depictions of life across the globe.
A gipsy musician, Parakalamos, Greece
Born in in the Peloponnese Region of southern Greece, Economopoulos studied law in Parma Italy. He became interested in photography during his mids, but, initially elected not to pursue it vocationally, instead, practicing solely during his free time.
“….it was important for me to keep the amateur gaze and maintain my freedom. I didn’t want my subsistence to depend on it, because this would tamper my freedom to explore.”
He began his professional career as a reporter, and it wasn’t until his mid-thirties that he began concentrating on photography mo
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Another of the book’s qualities is its representation of specific Balkan nations during the fall of communism. Was there a sense of contagious optimism, of hopes for a better future among the crowds of those times?
What I mostly recall is the anxiety. What you just described was not yet there, or at least it was not yet as visible – that must have come along later, around the mids. What I recorded was the direct, raw aftermath of the wars: the period when the dust starts settling and life starts picking up again, but everything still remains shady and uncertain.
In the former Yugoslavia, there was a heaviness related to [growing] nationalist sentiment, a sanitizing element of correctness, a heavy investment in minor things which were elevated out of all scale, revered and sanctified.
In contrast, one of the most interesting things I recall from that era is the bitter sarcasm and self-deprecating attitude towards the future that one encountered in Albania, which, at least in