“I dream my painting and I paint my dream,” famous artist Van Gogh allegedly once said. When it comes to the young Greek photographer Stylianos Papardelas, one could paraphrase as I dream my world and I shot my dream.
It is a fact: Greece is going through tough times, and people expect the inevitable without challenging it.
Stylianos Papardelas is definitely not one of them. A former student of Information Systems at the University of Crete, he started as an amateur photographer in 2006 with his first DSLR camera. Soon he realised that photography was his calling, and got involved in the Hellenic Photographic Society of Crete.
Then things moved fast for the young artist. Just six months later, he organised his first exhibition and has since participated in more than ten collective and individual exhibitions in Greece and abroad.
His photo 4800 Above Sea Level, taken in the deserted landscape of Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, was rated by National Geographic as one of the best 10 travelling photos for 2012 amidst 13,000 candidates. His work has dotted featured stories in several media services, such as IRIN news, the award-winning humanitarian news service of the United Nations, and the Washington-based National Public Radio.
“Photography gave me the freedom to be myself and create my own stories through my art,” says Papardelas. He is now based in Dublin, Ireland and works for the not-for-profit organization Barretstown as a photographer, but also as a moderator in life enhancing projects for seriously ill children. Co-founder of the digital media project The World of Ronah, Stylianos creates short documentary films and podcasts on travelling and street photography.
The 25-year-old artist spends most of his time on the road, searching to capture the reality of a forgotten world. His photos, as diverse as the places he has visited, invite us on a daring trip to the unknown: to all those lives who were never given a name, but who exist and claim their rights in a changing world.
From the cramped tin roof houses, patched with cardboard and soil in the steep slopes of the Rio favelas, to the male prostitutes of Constitucion in Buenos Aires that laugh loudly and woo the passers-by; from the dilapidated villages of northern Uganda where children dancing their war traumas away, to rural Asia, where barefoot men and women engage in the backbreaking work of the rice harvest – he’s captured them all.
Some pictures delight us, like the Cambodian mother who peacefully breastfeeds her baby in her makeshift home, or the smiling faces of the Burmese migrant workers playing a soccer match in a rare moment of rest and joy. But other pictures tell us a story we don’t want to know: trafficked children in Pnom Penh whose lives are sealed, a broken doll on a dirty bed telling of an innocence forever stolen.
For the young photographer, life is a road trip. He now has a very ambitious plan: to travel by local bus throughout South and Central Asia, covering 15,000 km from Myanmar to Turkey. Like life, Stylianos invites us on this perilous journey to discover a colourful world of hope and joy, but also of tears and uncertainty.
You can see the work of Stylianos Papardelas on his web site www.stylianospapardelas.com