The series Perilumen unfolds as a photographic exploration of the boundaries of visibility and the fragile relationship between gaze and light.
The images move between black and white not as a stylistic filter, but as an intentional conceptual space where luminosity and darkness collide, overlap, and penetrate one another.
At the core of the series lies the moment when visibility ceases to be certain and turns into something unstable, almost intangible. It is the moment when light is no longer a tool of revelation, but a field of uncertainty a shifting frontier the gaze seeks to define without ever fully containing it.
In each photograph, space, forms, and shadows appear suspended, as if held in a state of quiet expectancy. The photographic act does not document a decisive moment; rather, it captures an intermediate time a duration in which nothing has yet been revealed and nothing has yet been lost. These scenes do not describe; they suggest. The elements within the frame do not function as objects of recognition, but as carriers of silence, each one murmuring its own presence through stillness. Light — faint, diffused, or abrupt — becomes confined by the gaze and transformed into a site of introspection.
The choice of monochrome becomes a method of stripping the image to its essentials. Without color, the photograph is freed from decorative excess and brought into direct contact with its own inner tension: the relationship between matter and absence, visibility and concealment. Black and white are not mere tonalities, but two fields that meet in an imagined zone of transition. It is in this threshold, where neither prevails entirely over the other, that a third condition emerges — an “other” reality, not the one explicitly recorded, but the one allowed to surface implicitly.
It is within this transitional zone that the notion of Perilumen takes shape: the light that surrounds rather than illuminates. Light that does not disclose an object, but frames a question. Light that provides no answers, but creates space and time for interpretation. Perilumen is the luminous margin of a thought, the faint glow around silence, the soft radiance that reveals the in-between rather than the thing itself.
The series Perilumen proposes that reality is not always what is seen, but what is suggested. These images do not attempt to explain or document; they invite viewers into a space that is internal, often indeterminate, where light functions more as a question than a certainty. It is an invitation to experience a form of uncertain visibility — to linger in ambiguity, to confront darkness not as negation, but as a condition that shapes meaning.
In this space between revelation and concealment, the photographs of Perilumen invite the viewer to lose — and perhaps find — themselves within the very light that surrounds silence. Behind these images lies my own way of understanding photography and its role in my life — a gaze that seeks not explanation, but remembrance.
I would say, more generally, that I do not photograph in order to explain. I photograph in order to remember. To hold on to what slips away, to what remains silent. An image is not evidence. It is a place. A pause. A testimony.
Yes, photography is not objective.
It is a continuous reminder that the world is not what we see; that every photographic act is transformed into emotion at the moment of capture, turning a fleeting impression into a memory. I believe that photography is the art of perceptiveness — the result of a representation shaped by unpredictable moments. After all, human life is filled with images: events deposited in our memory as photographs.
About Antonis Giakoumakis
He was born and raised in Chania, Crete, and now lives in Chalandri, Attica. He has been systematically engaged in photography since 2012; for 37 years prior to that, his professional world was informatics.
He has attended numerous seminars and has participated in group exhibitions and photography competitions. Many of his photographic series have been published in international and Greek magazines, as well as in specialized platforms.
