Introducing Manolis Baboussis as featured in All over the place! curated by William A. Ewing.
 
 

 
“I like to photograph people, nature, to give them a new sense, a new perspective,” says photographer MANOLIS BABOUSSIS. Though trained as an architect, Baboussis first began taking photographs in the mid-’70s as a means of documentation. Since then, he’s produced images in a variety of visual themes, like “stations,” “monuments,” “fields,” and “waiting.” “When you wait for something,” he explains, “there’s a distance between you and what you wait for.” Another category for Baboussis is “busts,” in which he takes an unusual interpretation of the word by photographing ATM machines from around the world. While looking at an image of an ATM in New York City, Baboussis points out the equivalent to a head and shoulders of these “temples of money,” and suddenly they become strangely human.
 
Baboussis describes himself as a humanistic photographer without people. And people are rarely prominent figures in an image. If they are, they are usually photographed from behind, as in his series, “Watching.” Instead, subjects like money, banks, safety deposit boxes, and accumulation are all common in his work. It’s an attempt at underlining the “uselessness of the thing and the need for possessions,” he says. To do this, he uses repetition motifs. Whether it’s reflective trophies, a galaxy of shiny silver tubing and wires in the ceiling space of a television studio, a nightclub’s seating booths, or the headstones of a cemetery, Baboussis clearly communicates these ideas via imagery.
 
“I hope, if you go deeper,” he says, “that you will find your own interpretation and that for me is important.”
 
—Tami Mnoian