Photographs are fleeting moments that are kept for the purpose of telling stories. As a photojournalist and a street photographer, I like to photograph the moments that take place where I live, at Chania, a small city on the island of Crete, at the south corner of Greece.
Streets are a large part of our everyday lives. In streets no matter how different we are, we coexist. Streets are the veins where all people circulate. In this sense, streets are the place that the richness of life becomes evident. But Crete is a touristic destination with sandy beaches and picturesque sunsets.
Crete, in the years of the crisis became even more depended on the tourism industry. Everything seems to evolve around tourism. But in a way, the magnification of dependence of how the economy works from tourism makes Chania a less rich place, somehow reduced to an image that fits the idea tourists have of a touristic destination.
The constant repetition of similar images of beautiful sunny beaches, glorious sunsets and almost caricaturistic portraits of “indigenous people” imprints in the minds of people that this is really Crete. It casts a shadow to everything else that doesn’t serve the dominant narrative. What is hidden is the richness of life, the stories and events where everyday people that live in Crete make meaning of their life.
My effort is to bring back to the surface – as much as I can – all this richness of life that is hidden behind images of a touristic destination. In reality, what I believe is hidden are the real people behind the touristic product named Crete. And this is a problem. Because the more the touristic narrative prevails, the less important become all the other narratives which constitute the real lives of the people who live in the island.
As a news reporter I am trying to connect the dots between everyday life and news combining street photography with photojournalism, capturing the news of everyday life, documenting news as moments with significance for the purpose of telling stories.
Here, I have selected and present to you a mixture of photos that capture moments which I think make evident the richness of life in the city of Chania; The plurality of stories that are hidden behind the dominant touristic narrative.
