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Demetris Markoglou, Looking straight at you, Living

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Demetris Markoglou at his Famagusta Gate Exhibition, photo: Christos Theodorides

Multi award winning Cretan photographer Demetris Markoglou is currently exhibiting his works in Nicosia and admits there is an element of luck to them. THEO PANAYIDES meets them

The face is wizened, older than old; the face of a witch, or a seer, or a vampire. Pythia’s face at the Oracle of Delphi must’ve looked like this – though not as grimy. She looks like she’s been down a coal-mine, black dust tracing the lines and wrinkles beneath the white-dotted head-scarf. The mouth is a thin toothless line, squashed into irrelevance by the bulbous nose. The narrow eyes look straight at the camera, with an expression that’s hard to gauge: there’s suspicion, even hostility – but also a touch of exquisite boredom, like a film star acceding to the wishes of a lowly paparazzo, an impression reinforced by the hand on which the right cheek is cradled. Lined with grime like the rest of her, the hand nonetheless carries a touch of casual elegance – and perched between the fingers is a cigarette held loosely, even absent-mindedly, its cylinder of ash about to topple over. 

This is Madame Rosa – though that’s not her real name, just the name Demetris Markoglou calls her in his photographs. She was a gypsy (she died a few years ago) whom Demetris met in his weekend travels around his native Crete, leaving his home in Heraklion to drive up to small mountain villages, camera in hand, looking for “models”. That photo, which appears on the catalogue cover for his exhibition Wordless, was taken on their first meeting, which perhaps explains her wary expression; they subsequently knew each other for three or four years, and he took many more photos – perhaps 1,000, some of them included in Wordless – but never caught that precise expression again. That’s the thing about people, muses Demetris: “That feeling which a face can evoke as you look at it, is very difficult to recapture”. That’s why a photographer must be lucky, he adds wryly.

Then again, luck can’t explain the gallery of faces ranged around Famagusta Gate in Nicosia where we talk surrounded by exhibits, Demetris’ daughter Eva hovering at the side of potential buyers. ‘Companionship’ – a photo that’s won awards at photography salons from Spain to Malaysia – shows a woman with spotted, pitted skin but a strangely avid expression, hands clutching her face as if in wonder or delight, flanked by a pair of cats that glare at the camera with glowing yellow eyes (Demetris suddenly yelled at the cats, then clicked the shutter as they turned to face him). An old man in a coffee shop has a yellow towel draped around his shoulders, contrasting subtly with his gruff expression. A man reads in a room that’s been digitally switched to black-and-white (this is ‘Junkman’, another big award-winner). One woman’s expression is a silent cry of pain. Another old woman with thinning hair peers from behind a blue door, her extraordinary features giving her the look of a goblin or house-elf out of Harry Potter.

Demetris has been wildly successful. Since 2005 he’s taken part in 244 salons (i.e. contests) and won 127 prizes. Here’s the thing, however: in the 52 years before that (he was born in 1953) he took part in exactly zero salons, and won zero prizes. He was still a photographer – he’s never done anything else – but not an ‘artistic’ photographer, not the kind whose work gets exhibited. Instead he took photos of consumer products for magazine ads, snapped people’s pictures in the studio, and occasionally shot wedding videos.

Why such a late bloomer? The answer to that lies with his father, Giorgos Markoglou, about whom Demetris speaks with reverence. Markoglou Sr. was world-famous, winning many international awards – at a time, adds his son pointedly, when that was far more difficult than it is now. He was a leading figure in the “Cretan school of photography”, a style built on emotional intensity and black backgrounds, giving the impression of faces floating in darkness (Demetris sees his own style as an extension of this school). “So you see, there was a fear,” he explains. “And the fear was ‘what shall I do?’ Shall I take part in international contests too? My father’s way up here, I’m down there. What shall I do?”

Everyone has to start somewhere, I point out. There’s no shame in it.

“Of course not,” he agrees – but doesn’t seem to register my objection. “Maybe I was also respectful of certain things. Of my father. So when my father died 10 years ago, that’s when I started. You understand why. I mean, you can see why I did it. It was a kind of obligation that kept me locked up while my father lived. And maybe a fear, if you like. ‘What can I accomplish?’ My father’s done such great things, what am I in comparison, I’m nothing in comparison.”

Do I see? Well, yes and no. It might be understandable if Demetris and Giorgos had a bad relationship – but in fact, the opposite seems to have been true. The son was at his father’s side from the age of five, helping dry photos and develop film in the darkroom; by the age of 20, he recalls, he was already “a complete photographer”. He never considered any other job, “it never even crossed my mind to be anything else” – yet he spent the next three decades doing journeyman work, knowing (as he must’ve known) that he had all this creativity locked away inside him. Even his father urged him to take part in salons and contests, as did his friends and wife Christina (who’s also a photographer), but to all of them he said the same thing: someday I’ll do it, but I’ll decide when I’m ready. No wonder, he admits with a chuckle, that when he finally switched to artistic photography “there was so much power stored away inside me, which was suddenly free and able to come out. Within five years, from 2005-2009, there was a deluge of prizes from all over the world.”

There’s a more practical reason why Demetris Markoglou took so long to find his metier: he didn’t have time. It’s easier now, because his son Giorgos is also a photographer and able to help out (only Eva hasn’t joined the family business), but creating the kinds of pictures on the walls of Famagusta Gate takes time and money, especially time. You wander aimlessly, looking for likely subjects. You stop in a small remote village, sit in the coffee shop, have a coffee, look around. Quite often, you won’t find anyone, and the day is wasted. Even if you do, however, that’s only the first step – because the “model” has to be befriended. You have to win their trust. It might take a day, a week, a month. You go to their house, bringing sweets or a small gift. “We become friends. That’s how the model is able to externalise the feelings they feel,” explains Demetris. “Many people who sit for a photograph end up bursting into tears. Because, you know, they tell me their problems.”

He doesn’t tell them he’s a photographer, so as not to scare them off. At some point, he shrugs, “they just see that I’ve taken out a camera and I’m taking pictures”. He doesn’t find the process of connection all that difficult – maybe because he’s a sociable person, or because it’s easy to imagine others trusting him; he’s unruffled and unthreatening, vaguely professorial, with his slow way of speaking, calm grey-blue eyes and receding hairline. Sometimes he’ll prompt the model to look a certain way, trying “to adjust his expression according to what I see in his face”. Sometimes he just gets lucky, as with Madame Rosa and her cigarette. But it’s still a long-term relationship, if only because familiarity breeds better photos; often, he’ll spend his weekends doing the rounds of models, visiting this person here, that person there – and always on the lookout for new subjects.

What about ethical questions? What about Photoshop, for instance (though that’s more of an artistic question)? Demetris’ photos are digitally processed and manipulated. Printed on canvas and hanging on the walls of the gallery, they look more like paintings than photos (some, like ‘Junkman’, depend entirely on computer magic for their impact). “We live in the digital age,” he says simply, adding that computers allow one to be more creative. Then there’s the charge that his photos exaggerate the subjects’ more grotesque aspects, the wrinkles and liver-spots and mournful expressions. There’s a certain emphasis on “the elements that exist in elderly people,” admits Demetris. “These things exist, I haven’t changed anything or misrepresented anything”. Yet he also notes that, when presenting photos to his models as a gesture of thanks, he chooses “normal photos”, those in which they’re smiling and laughing – even while selecting for exhibition the abnormal ones, those in which their faces are clouded and distorted by extreme emotion.

Would they be happy with his choices, if they came down from their mountain villages (or the afterlife, in some cases) and wandered through Wordless? Probably not – but that’s the way it goes: “I won’t pick a photo where they’re laughing. I choose the elements that inspire me personally”. Isn’t there another ethical question here? A question of exploitation, maybe even betrayal of the friendship between artist and model? 

Demetris sighs, hacking his way through the moral labyrinth. “You may be right, in that ultimately you make a friend of someone in order to get something from them – but Art in general works like that. What can I tell you, you can’t do it differently. It’s just not possible.” He shrugs, looking more professorial than ever. “You can take a model and pay them, and tell them what to do – but it probably won’t be the same. This, on the other hand, is very authentic, it’s something that comes from the actual person. But you can’t do it differently. You have to be their friend, to get the result you’re looking for.” 

Some may call it exploitation, but it isn’t really – because it isn’t done for selfish reasons. Yes, the artist gets the plaudits (and money from selling the photos), but he’s really just a vessel. Demetris Markoglou had to intervene, befriending Madame Rosa and the others and getting these moments out of them – these expressions, these glimpses of their inner souls – so that We the Audience could see them too, and commune with these strange, long-dead people. “When you sit in front of a photo, you think it’s talking to you, you think it’s trying to tell you something,” he points out, gazing round at his subjects. “There’s a very strong element of connection in these pictures.

“As you see, most of the photos are looking at you,” adds Demetris Markoglou – and it’s true, most of his old mountain people look straight at the camera; straight at him, the even-tempered man from the city who bought them coffee and listened to their problems, and asked only a few clicks of his shutter in return. “It’s like they’re judging you. It’s like they’re talking to you”. So much for ‘Wordless’.