The Benaki Museum presents the photographic exhibition “The Gross Essence of Things” with the lens of Ellie Papadimitriou, edited by the historian Ioanna Petropooulou, at the Ghika Gallery (3 Kriezotou Street) from November 16, 2022 to January 7, 2023.

In Greece, between the wars, there was a “photographic revolution”: the transition from the closed environment of the workshop and stylized poses to the open urban and rural space and its depiction. A magical box – a camera – seduces Ellie Papadimitriou, who has been studying art since her student days in England.

A little later, after 1922, having already settled in Athens, she joined a young group experimenting with photography. Ellie Papadimitriou’s attitude towards photography stems from her love of painting. As leader of the Refugee Resettlement Committee (REC) and partner of the Center for Asia Minor Studies (KMS), equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, she follows expatriates and indigenous people on land and in coastal settlements. Turning to language to express himself, he builds a new knowledge of the homeland from the opening. Through the lens, he composes the alphabet of ancient and modern Greece. Space exploration is done with Kodak’s “own” tool.

Far from being a folklore pictorial, Papadimitriou also takes over agrarian Greece while maintaining a critical distance. A schismatic spirit, a rebellious mind that rejects illegal exoticism, he works not as a naturalist, but as an anatomist. With her ethnological view, she seeks to “correctly highlight the rough essence of things.”

Papadimitriou no longer photographs the post-colonial period. In 1976, she sold some of her photographic possessions to the Benaki Museum. At the same time, he publishes old unused material, integrating it into a new ideological framework. It offers contemporary political and environmental implications for her work. She shares her fifty years of work for the first time, dividing the material thematically into three sections, subtitled “Old Photographs”. Three albums were released in order: Epirus-Macedonia (Ermis edition, 1977), Islands (Kedros edition, 1978) and Athens-Piraeus-Kaisariani (Ermis edition, 1979).

The present exhibition presents photographs from these three albums, taken between 1928 and the early 1950s, which form part of a larger collection that has yet to see the light of day.