The world of photography has lost one of its great exponents. Earlier this month, the legendary Greek-American photographer Constantinos (Constantine) Manos, who was 90, died.
Although Manos was very prominent in American photographic circles as a member of the prestigious international news agency Magnum, and his pictorial reimagining of everyday life in the United States is widely lauded, for this writer, Constantine Manos’ photographic sojourn in remote villages and islands of Greece in the early 1960s—culminating in the publication of his seminal work “A Greek Portfolio”—stands out as a cultural beacon in the Greek-American diasporic landscape.
Constantine Manos was born in 1934 in Columbia, South Carolina. His parents, Dimitri and Aphrodite (Vaporiotou) Manos, had emigrated to the United States from the island of Afisia (Avşa) in the Sea of Marmara off Turkiye during the tumultuous population exchange following the Asia Minor Disaster in 1923.
From the age of thirteen, Constantine took up photography with his school's photography club and quickly demonstrated an aptitude for working behind the camera lens.
In 1952, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina and studied English literature. There, he first read about the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who pioneered street photography and famously wrote about photography capturing the “decisive moment”. The young Costa Manos (as he was also known) bought the same Leica camera and Ilford film and, in his own words, it was around this time that he “began a lifelong search for beautiful and poetic images”.
But he also never forgot about his Greek roots. He recalled that his parents’ village by the sea was beautiful, that his grandfather Konstantinos was a fisherman, and, as a result, “we are very sea people … we love the sea.”
From 1961, he travelled several times to his ancestral homeland and spent three years in Greece.
One of his first assignments was on the island of Hydra to take photos on the movie set of Phaedra, a film directed by Jules Dassin and featuring Melina Mercouri and Anthony Hopkins.
He returned in 1962 to photograph on the film set of America America by the Greek-American theatrical producer, screenwriter, and director Elia Kazan. The film follows the journey of a young Greek immigrant seeking passage to the United States.
But Manos also yearned to find his parents’ χωριό (village) and capture the essence of the rural lifestyle that they had left behind.
As he told Christina Kalligiani in an interview for Photonet in 2013, it was definitely the “village” which he had heard about from his parents:
“Since I was little I had Greek in me, we spoke Greek at home and I went back to Greece when I felt ready that I could do something serious.”
And thus A Greek Portfolio was conceived, a collection of photographs that captured defining moments of daily life. As he later recounted:
“I realised that the most beautiful material was in the most isolated places, without tourists, at the end of some dirt road. And so I developed the rule of only working in villages that didn’t have electricity. In all these villages the people were very warm. They had never seen a tourist and they found it interesting that I was Greek-American. They always found a place for me to stay, without having to pay. There was always a place either in the cafe or in the church where they would put a bed and a basin for me and a woman would come in the morning to bring me water and they would always offer me food. They were very poor and the food was just basic: peas, bread, feta cheese...but I loved it.”
Constantine Manos was greatly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, as evidenced by his realistic and sometimes photojournalistic approach to the subjects he captured with his lens.
Cartier-Bresson, who had begun his formal photography career in the early 1930s, was one of the first photographers to shoot in the 35mm format with a Leica camera, often photographing his subjects in artfully candid moments of motion or, as he termed it, the Decisive Moment when a precisely-timed photograph captures a spontaneous and fleeting scene.
One of the iconic images from Cartier-Bresson’s impressive body of work is Sifnos (1961), in which he photographed a young girl in mid-stride running up a set of outdoor steps on the island of Sifnos, caught in a seeming labyrinth of lines and shadows against the backdrop of traditional Cycladic architecture.
Constantine Manos was inspired by the concept of the decisive moment, or as Vlassas et al in their essay “Greece before 1980 through the lens of Konstantinos Manos, Robert A McCabe, Herbert List and Henri Cartier-Bresson in the early period of tourism in Greece” have described it, the “spiritual, essentially, vigilance that the photographer must have in order to ‘capture’ the event before it takes place, before it is completed”.
One of Manos’ iconic images is “Boy with hoop in Crete” (1964), which is in the humanistic photographic tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
A Greek Portfolio
Constantine Manos' monochrome photographs of people and landscapes that he photographed in Greece between 1961 and 1964 were published in the 1972 album "A Greek Portfolio" and won awards at Arles and the Leipzig Book Fair. The book has become a sought-after classic.
A new edition of A Greek Portfolio was reissued in 1999, accompanied by a major exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens.
In the album’s preface, Manos wrote:
“Each photograph in this album is a personal experience and a special moment in time, both for the photographer and the subject. The people captured in these photographs live in small villages and isolated farmhouses, scattered throughout the Greek countryside. Most are poor people but extremely proud and with a strong personality.”
In his album, Manos captured ephemeral everyday moments and unusual faces of the Greek countryside with a simple but tender gaze, such as “Going home from the fields, Kritsa, Crete” (1962).
Manos would later say that the image of the Cretan mother and her children on a donkey was his “best photo” as it depicted a heroine returning from the fields, the photo typically being taken at a slow shutter speed to capture fleeting, everyday moments and the distinctive faces of the Greek countryside.
Another image from the portfolio, “Women at Graveside, Mani, Greece” (1962), features a group of grieving older women, their faces distorted by anguish and tears, personifying the mask of tragedy.
As the Benaki Museum retrospective exhibition noted:
“It is a poetic transformation of the daily, and at times harsh, existence into images of magical moments. With introspection and humility he allows his protagonists to disclose themselves, and through the timing of the shutter and his classical compositions he leads us to truths, and meanings that are universal.”
Armed with his Leica, and a desire to compose magical images, Manos sought out remote villages and island communities to capture the lives of what he would describe as poor but haughty people, set against a backdrop of rural simplicity and tranquility, fighting with dignity for survival, and committed to a way of life that has remained unchanged for centuries.
This led him to the remote village of Olympos on the island of Karpathos where his photographic vignettes capture exquisite fleeting moments of an austere but happy existence, including children in the village school.
Or the woman from Karpathos, who holds her child tightly in her arms and with wide eyes intently watches the events around her.
Or the photograph of the Cretan lady, dressed demurely in black, with her goats, evoking what the photographer termed the “poetics of photography” through a series of images that are timeless in their expression of the quality of life in rural Greece.
In Crete, he also captured the sombre, almost foreboding, solitude of the immigrant.
In 2013 an exhibition “Constantine Manos: A Greek Portfolio 50 Years Later” commemorating the 50th anniversary of the making of the photographs for the book, including eighty previously unpublished images, was held that further enhanced the beauty and depth of Manos' body of work.
With masterly insight, Manos opened his shutter on those moments that distill the essence of character and occasion to create a series of images that are timeless in their expression of the quality of life in rural Greece.
As Constantine Manos described his photographic impulse:
“The flow of people in a setting, their changing relationships to each other, their environment, and their constantly changing expressions, all combine to create dynamic situations that provide limitless choices of when to push the button.”
His Photographic Gaze created timeless images:
The Athenians
In 2003 Manos returned to Greece on assignment for Magnum to prepare for the 2004 Athens Olympics. He chose as his theme the Athenians and although it was for him more of a journalistic approach and not so much an artistic or poetic one, nevertheless his colour images of daily aspects of Athenian life are poignant.
As the authors of Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities (2019, Routledge) have noted, the sensuality of Constantine Manos' colour photography derives from his emphasis on complex textures, lush colour, and a sculptural treatment of the human figure.
What also sets Manos apart is his skill in composition and his understanding of light and the striking interaction of shapes, shadows and textures.
Constantine Manos' Legacy
In 2022, in a reception in Washington, DC, the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, on behalf of the Hellenic Republic, awarded Constantine Manos the Order of the Phoenix in recognition of his “longstanding commitment and support to the Hellenic culture, his extraordinary achievements in the field of photography and promotion of the arts and culture".
Glowing tributes have come from colleagues and admirers alike.
Marina Kontotoli, the Head of Culture and Sports for SYRIZA, one of the opposition parties in the Greek Parliament, wrote succinctly:
"Photography, through the lens of Constantinos Manos, became a bridge between cultures, memories and emotions. Manos, with his gaze, not only recorded images but also told stories that will accompany us forever. With his deep humanity and artistic sensitivity, he captured the soul of Greece and spread it throughout the world, while his work was a source of inspiration for generations of photographers … His work will remain immortal, reminding us that art can unite the past with the future."
Magnum President Cristina de Middel was no less effusive:
“Costa belonged to an earlier generation of Magnum, yet his work continues to inspire many of us who never had the chance to meet him personally. His ability to capture the poetry of everyday life with unmatched sensitivity and a keen eye for light and color has left an indelible mark on the history of photography.”
Constantine Manos’ photographs are included in the permanent collections of important institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Atlanta Museum of Art, and the Benaki Museum.
May his memory and inspiration be eternal.
George Vardas is the Arts and Culture Editor and is a keen photographer. Constantine Manos remains a major source of creative inspiration. Images are courtesy of @Magnum Photos/Constantine Manos.