Documentary photographer Effy Alexakis will celebrate the publication of her new book ‘Effy Alexakis: Forty Photographs – A Year at a Time’ with a premier launch at the Hellenic Club in Canberra on Sunday, 5 March.
For the last forty years, Alexakis has recorded the nation’s Greek-Australian community through image; in partnership with historian Leonard Janiszewski.
In 2022 the photographer accessed her vast archive on the Greek-Australian experience, selecting one contemporary image together with its associated story to represent each year since 1982.
Her aim was to reveal the changing face of Greek-Australians.
Neos Kosmos spoke with the artist in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the process behind this culminative work.
“Well last year I was asked to put an exhibition together for the Greek Festival of Sydney and seeing as they were celebrating the event’s 40th anniversary I thought it should be something special,” she explains.
“The gallery space we were working with was quite small, so the idea of choosing one image for each year came about, and so with a lot of work and effort I settled on these 40 images.”
Effy explains that this project is more personal than her previous work;
“The opening image is of my parents at our family fish and chip shop in ’82; the second photograph was taken at the cemetery as my mother mourned my father.”
“And the final photo is of my mother in 2022, it draws closed the circle of those 40 years really,” she says.
Each photo proved an important snapshot of Alexakis’ personal journey as well as her ever changing understanding of her community and heritage; both in Australia and overseas.
The zenith of that journey is a beautifully designed hardcover book showcasing the photographer’s ongoing documentary work and personal photographic aesthetic.
Alongside the photographs chronicling Hellenism in Australia over the last four decades, it includes an introductory text by Alexakis as well as two essays written by Richard Neville and project partner Leonard Janiszewski.
Neville, a Mitchell Librarian at the State Library of NSW says Alexakis “sees herself very much as a documentary photographer and, I would suggest, a social historian.”
Explaining that in his analysis “a hallmark of her work is her capacity to engage with her subjects – the impact of her photography is its fundamental humanity.”
The new publication has garnered praise both at home and abroad.
Professor Mary Kalantzis, a multidisciplinary academic from the University of Illinois, USA notes that while “the image has its limits, in time and in space (…) Effy is a master of this, evoking meaning of longer timeframes and spaces wider than the frame of her viewfinder.”
Lex Marinos OAM, actor, director and arts administrator says “nothing tells us as much about ourselves as a photograph. The camera shutter blinks like an eyelid in a fraction of a second and immortalises a moment in time.”
“The paradox is that in the hands of a good photographer that fraction of a second has the potential to make time elastic. It can represent a day, a year, a decade or a whole era,” he continues.
“This is the moment that the photographer hopes to capture, because if they are lucky enough to do so, then they know they have actually captured a piece of human emotion so pure that it speaks universally…”
Photography critic Robert McFarlane characterises Alexakis’ photographs as having “a consistent humanity.”
“There is also a little of the great Magnum photographer Constantine Manos in her capacity to embrace the Greekness of herself and her subjects.”
“Manos struggled and ultimately succeeded in coming to terms with his ancestry in his book A Greek Portfolio. Alexakis ploughs a similar field with equal dignity,” he says.
Alexakis says that in looking back over her past work for this project and captioning the images, they often differ from the annotations which they’d been given at the time they were captured.
“It’s been very interesting working back,” she says.
The launch event will include an ‘in conversation’ discussion with Alexakis and project partner, historian Leonard Janiszewski moderated by Justice Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson.
Justice Loukas-Karlsson was sworn in as a judge of the Supreme Court of the ACT in March 2018.
Her parents Ilias and Aphrodite Loukas migrated “for a better life” from Epirus in northern Greece during the mid-1950’s.
By the mid-60’s they were operating the New Star Café in Rockhampton, Queensland.
At her swearing-in ceremony at the Supreme Court in Canberra, she concluded her appointment address by recognising the Hellenic past in the present, in her heritage, and in the legal system of which she is a part:
“Socrates stated some two and a half thousand years ago that the essential qualities of a judge are to listen courteously, answer wisely, consider soberly and decide impartially. That statement stands true today, and therefore the time for me to speak is over, and it is now time for me to listen.”
Justice Loukas-Karlsson is herself featured in Alexakis’ new book.
More information on all of Effy Alexakis and Leonard Janiszewski’s books to date, including the widely lauded and newly reprinted ‘Greek Cafés & Milk Bars of Australia’ can be found here.
Where: Hellenic Club of Canberra, Apollo Room, 1 Matilda Street, Woden, ACT
When: Sunday, 5 March 2023 at 3pm
Contact: 02 6281 0899