Your name
Vassilis Vasileiou
Place of birth
Athens, Greece
Place where you live now
Athens, Greece
3 words to describe you
stubborn, patient, perfectionist
Why do you take pictures?
Being a corporate lawyer by profession, photography is my safe haven and my passport to situations and people I'd have never otherwise experienced and met, respectively.
Where do you get your inspiration?
I am inspired by anything mundane and ordinary. I am particularly drawn to quotidian scenes and I love to question the way that we perceive our day-to-day routines. I am also hugely inspired by the people that I meet and the situations that I find myself into thanks to photography.
Who are your influences?
Luigi Ghirri, Alec Soth, Stephen Shore, Robert Frank, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Max Pinckers, just to name a few.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Primarily it's my then current mood and my instinct. I may be somehow guided by the projects that I am working on during that period, e.g. photographing portraits at the beach or details from my neighborhood but in general I am going out there to enjoy the process of photographing and not to make successful photographs that fit somewhere specifically.
What impact would you like your art to have?
While I'd be pleased to know that people recognize part of themselves in my photographs, I mainly photograph to satisfy my inner need to do so and not to have any impact on anybody.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Any artwork that is sincere, true and intelligent.
Is there anything you want to add?
"When the child was a child, It threw a stick like a lance against a tree, And it quivers there still today." (Peter Handke, Lied Vom Kindsein)

The Voice of Cicada
Project statement

I live in the southern suburbs of Athens. Inhabited continuously since ancient times, this is a place characterized by material abundance and luxurious lifestyle. At the same time, barbed fences and surveillance cameras turn the houses into border barricades and the streets into an urban “no-man’s land”. This setting poses questions about the role of my own domestic comfort zone and whether protection and restriction are actually the two sides of the same coin.

By documenting the paradoxical elements that surround my everyday life, I try to make sense of myself and address my own existential questions. Seen together, these elements form heterotopias that are extracted from their surroundings, offer a new viewpoint and make a novel comment upon the existing references. Having the documentary genre as a starting point, the reality that I present is therefore a distilled one, a visual testimony of my endeavor to re-create the environment and the people that surround me. My heroes, as alternate versions of myself, dwell in affluence, within their dazzling, colorful bubbles. Both watching and being watched, they look like fireflies in a sealed jar filled with sugar water.

vassilis vasileiou
@vassilis.vasileiou