Ιris Kritikou writes for Sofia’s work: overwhelmed by hushed music interludes and hidden street scenes, is a sincere enchanting record of ‘‘Zeitgeist’’, the floating restless spirit of her era’’. ‘‘Her pictures both the black and white ones, with intense almost like painted on canvas contrast, and the colour ones, with sudden outbursts of red or yellow, blue or violet, are integrated in the same modular narrative of an ongoing fascinating universal wandering, and featured with a quality of visual imagery often referring to the art of film making. They trace and recall consecutive encounters and journeys in the European and overseas metropolitan cities, eloquently charting changeable horizons of minor not recorded incidents. In Gdansk, Athens, Edinburgh, Madrid, Barcelona, New York and Paris people intersect time and meet in the familiar niches of their very diversity: between the sun and the shadow, tween girls and restless boys, elderly in slow motion and young couples in warm liaisons, play or walk, are at a standstill or dance, discuss or stay silent, enter in transverse immediacy in the path of the narrative.
Sofia Vikatou’s street stories are still surprisingly luminous even through the sorrow of their heroes. These silent portraits poise in whisper on the edge of the expressive thread, reminiscent of short music ballads while the lens focuses with gentle intimacy behind and beyond their field of vision. By signing this chapter the photographer suggests an open field of encounter for a humanity who confesses in perpetual motion, a concise short story of the fragile delicate palimpsest of the modern world.
The photographer herself remarks upon her work: ‘‘My photography is mainly experiential. When I started street photography, little did I know that the people I would photograph would help me interpret my inner knots. When I let these people enter my life as photographs, they helped me see it as an endless road, where the people and their glances asked the ultimate question of how I could capture with my camera the roles they presented as photography themes.
In real life everything is more serious and personal since people come in direct contact with me demanding emotions and reactions in order to build some kind of friendship. The people that ‘that turned out good in the photographs came as a surprise to me, however they remained there expecting honest emotions from me. They made me wonder why I kept them and not somebody else on my walls, my computer and my books. As time went by I came to love and idealize them.’’
Curation: Iris Kritikou
Duration: from February 20th to March 10th 2020
