The photographs collected in this book suggest a journey off the beaten track where my personal exploration of my native island Zakyntos (Greece), is shared with you in the hope to leave you with an emotional understanding of the place more than a literal sense of location. Photography, contrary to the common belief, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.
It’s impossible to objectively describe a place or the people who live there anyway. Every adjective suggests the opposite. Every description evokes a contradiction. In trying to document a specific place, to put it into context and to show what it’s really like, we photographers do not easily escape the traps of cliché and stereotypes. I hope that I have done my best to avoid them. Since this is a personal exploration, many aspects of life in the island have been ignored.
I am more of an observer than an intruder. Still, through my photographs, I seek to create a world that is fictional in spite of being made with the raw materials of reality.