Khpiros, Ano Peristeri, 1961. Lamprini, Maria and Eleni laugh as they look into the camera lens. The youngest is barefoot and holds her damaged shoes in her hand. “These people who appear barefoot in my photographs are clearly not going to a beach party. They are barefoot because the shoes were very expensive and those who had them did not want to wear them out,” Robert McCabe tells me.

“This hope is expressed in the subtitle of your new book, Greece After the War. Years of hope, where is she? I asked him.

“Those smiles are hope,” he replies. At the same time, he opens his cell phone and proudly explains to me that it contains 95,000 photos. Despite his advanced age, Mr. McCabe, Bob to many of his friends, is very tech savvy. “The phone has AI,” he explains to me. As frames of decades of photographic work pass under his finger, he stops at a color portrait of three middle-aged women. They hold each other’s hands and look shyly into the camera. These are the three girls that the twenty-seven-year-old American photographer met in his time in a relatively recent photograph taken on the occasion of a photo exhibition in Monodendri. The years had taken the sparkle out of their eyes, the smiles had dwindled, although they were all trimmed and well dressed.

When I arrived in Greece, there were only 180,000 foreigners a year, including diplomats and professionals.

“Do you recognize the spirit of post-war Greece in our time?” I asked him.

“For some people, yes,” he replies. “Of course, relationships in Athens are very impersonal, but there are also quiet neighborhoods like Anafiotika. There are also villages in Greece without much tourism, where relations have not changed. Consider that when I arrived in Greece in the 1950s, there were only 180,000 foreigners a year, including diplomats, professionals and tourists. Very often, upon arrival on the islands, we did not meet other foreign guests except ourselves. Back in the early 60s, I remember that my brother, going to Io, wrote to me that he had discovered another virgin island. We went there with our doctor from New York, who at the last moment canceled all his appointments to come to Greece. And we found that there were five French tourists. My brother was so upset about the ‘multicosm’ that he wanted us to leave immediately.”

Robert McCabe comes from a family of journalists, and in his gaze, in addition to personal aesthetics, there is an awareness that the camera is a witness to History. His father was the publisher of the New York Daily Mirror, one of the first newspapers to publish photographs, and little Bob had a photo lab at home where he printed his photographs very early.

Studying French literature at Princeton, love for Europe and its culture. The adventurous spirit of American youth in the 1950s prompted two young McCabes, Bob and his older brother Charles, to take a boat and get to Greece. They were vagabonds, but in the end they stayed here, discovering a place untouched by modern civilization. Was Greece after World War II a country that laughed widely despite its suffering? Or the benevolent look of a photographer who managed to capture moments of innocence in the difficult life of educated people?

A beautiful country, but mired in poverty

A rich edition of “Greece after the war. Years of Hope” accompanies Robert McCabe’s photo exhibition of the same name at the European Cultural Center of Delphi (EPCEC), which opens on 10 June. In Greece, the book is published by Patakis under the auspices of EPKeD, and the English version will soon be published by Abbeville Press, which represents the author in New York.

In the opening note, McCabe describes his first visit to Greece in the summer of 1954, ten years after the German withdrawal and five years after the end of the Civil War. “Greece, which I first saw, was mired in poverty. It was visible everywhere. “Often, when you spoke to a Greek about the beauty of his country, he would answer: “Yes, but it is very poor,” and to reinforce his words, he would rub his thumb with his forefinger,” he writes. And he continues: “What I noticed while visiting and then living in Greece was at first a slow recovery, but then a marked growth and transformation into a modern European state. Before the war, Greece was one of the poorest countries in Europe, so the path was long and difficult.”

EPKeD President Panagiotis Roilos, a professor at Harvard University, who also participated in the selection of photographs for the book, reflects on the relationship between memorialization and documentation. Referring to the historical context in which this material is included, he notes that in the 1950s and 1960s the country began to recover steadily. “The Allies, mainly the Americans and the British, came to the rescue, but not without securing political, economic and military benefits and privileges. Between the end of the civil war (1949) and the post-colonial revolution of 1974, political institutions in Greece were largely democratic in name only,” he writes.

However, he acknowledges that there is something intrinsically nostalgic about the art of photography that “often evokes the desire to ‘return’ to the eternal present without gaps, breaks or the past.” Greece, “seen” by the camera, idealized? Obviously, as in art, creation is inspired and fertilized by the imagination of the creator. Thus, Mr. Roylos concludes, this particular art “gives its products a marginal function between evidence and monuments.”

What I observed as a visitor was first a slow recovery and then a transformation into a modern European state.

Research about post-war Greece for this publication was conducted by journalist Katerina Limberopoulou. As for the photograph, a black-and-white image of a worker intensively working on the grounds of the Herodeum, which in the mid-1950s was to become the center of the newly founded Athens Festival, he defines 1955 “as a transitional moment in time between an era of terrible suffering and a new, hopeful reconstruction which he initiated.”

Her text about the photographer’s introduction to Greece ends where our own text begins: in Ano Peristeri Epirus and meeting with Lambrini, Maria and Eleni. “Three little friends are dressed in clothes that their mothers probably made. While it is almost certain that their families would have counted the losses in the difficult years that preceded them, their smiling faces carry the joy of a life that, after every obstacle, finds a way to continue at an even faster pace than before,” concludes Mrs. Limberopul.

On the opening day of the exhibition, EPCED will host a round table conference “Postwar Greece by Robert McCabe”.

The exhibition “Delphi in the 1950s through the lens of Robert McCabe” also opens at the Delphi Archaeological Museum.