Your name Panos Charalampidis and Mary Chairetaki Place of birth Panos: Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece. Mary: Heraklion, Crete, Greece. Place where you live now Heraklion, Crete, Greece. 3 words to describe you Passionate, Committed, Cat-lovers! Why do you take pictures? We take pictures to realise our visions and communicate our thoughts. We always take pictures, with or without cameras. Where do you get your inspiration? We get inspired by the stories of the people we meet, nature, the world around us, music, movies, and artists we love. Who are your influences? Our influences are many and diverse. Among others, we love the work of Alec Soth, as well as Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, and Christian Patterson. What determines the subject matter you choose? We should be deeply interested in it. What impact would you like your art to have? We want our work to be open-ended and ideally create small universes, so the viewers can immerse into our subject and contemplate. What artwork do you never get bored with? "Melancholia" by Lars von Trier. Is there anything you want to add? We have created a fine-art, handmade, accordion book for "Mother Motif". You can check it on our website, among our other projects. Thank you, see-zeen, for sharing our work! panos-mary
What is a mother’s love for her daughter, but all the acts of kindness that, hopefully, will become learned behaviors and eventually evolve into fluid patterns? This process creates a common space for generations of women to share practices and forge what is called family. Through their childhood, layers and layers of maternal devotion cover them like fabric that they will carry for the rest of their lives, a cloak of identity.
Panos: I met my parents-in-law 12 years ago, and they were both kind-hearted people. Soon I became aware of the special relationship that my wife had with her mother. By discreetly observing their relationship, I better understood my wife.
Mary: I was raised by a gentle father but fragile at the same time and a strong-minded mother who thinks the world of me. Trying to keep the best out of both, not always successfully, I am struggling to dance my own dance, disrupting the mother motif.
