This edition was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name organized by the Educational Foundation of the National Bank in collaboration with the Museum of Photography of Thessaloniki at the Cultural Center of Thessaloniki of MIET (May 5 – August 11, 2017). It includes the photographs from the exhibition, a result of the twenty-five-year engagement of photographer Avraam Pavlidis with abandoned internal professional spaces from various locations in Greece.

As noted in his text by the exhibition curator Iraklis Papaioannou, Pavlidis’s gaze “insisted authentically on the theme of abandonment, as a reverent pilgrimage of the ruins left behind by the dying life and the advancing modernity.” As a simple commentary “after 2010, while the country had abruptly entered the abyss of the crisis,” the photographer “turned to abandoned facilities of the industrial society that produced mass products and behaviors”: factories, stores, camps, hotels, hospitals, and public buildings.

His work could easily represent an image of a dystopian future, while simultaneously wholly belonging to the past. Ultimately, however, it highlights abandonment as a timeless motif that underscores the end of communities or entire societies.

Its two pillars are on one hand the document, a strong foundation of photography, and on the other the artist's tenure in architectural design and painting. Thanks to this apprenticeship, Pavlidis's lens can deliver images with a haunting atmosphere and an almost tangible sense of decay.

Pavlidis “becomes an observer of the ruins generated by acute competition, increasing speed, and the muffled violence of progress,” continues H. Papaioannou. “He travels throughout the country with the constant motivation to behold an image he has not seen before.” “He appreciates the virtues of tradition while constantly seeking new images in its ashes, amid new ruins. Perhaps this enigmatic contradiction constitutes the fingerprint of an entire era. And Pavlidis seems irresistibly drawn to the enigmatic contradictions and the carefully hidden secrets.”

Avraam Pavlidis was born in Thessaloniki in 1950. Between 1957 and 1968, he lived in the village of Gazoros in Serres. From 1969 to 1972, he studied Decoration and then worked for two years in an architectural design office, while simultaneously developing an interest in painting. He worked for many years in a book distribution company. In 1976, he began to travel in Greece. He has been photographing since 1990, gradually focusing his interest on the representation of indoor spaces, mainly from the Greek countryside, which bear distinct traces of a declining or forgotten tradition.

His photographs have been presented in recent years in solo and group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, including, among others, the solo exhibition at the Museum of Photography of Thessaloniki (2004) and this one at the Vienna gallery Forum am Schillerplatz (2009). His work has been published in the monographs Traditional Hubs (MFT, 2004) and The Last Gaze (Eurydice, 2010).