The album was published to accompany the photographic exhibition "The Andros of Andreas Empeirikos" organized by the Kairios Library in Andros Town on July 16, 2004, curated by Giannis Stathatos, where 104 photographs were displayed.
This is an extensive album of 324 pages with 240 Andros photographs by Andreas Empeirikos and an anthology of his writings about Andros. The introductory texts are signed by Giannis Stathatos (curator of the exhibition), D.I. Polemis, a historian of Andros and director of the Kairios Library, and Leonidas Empeirikos, the poet's son, who signs a significant biographical and interpretative text about his father.
The photographic material includes a section of photographs from the 1920s, where the 19-year-old Empeirikos follows his father in Andros during an election campaign and writes Palamian verses in the margins of the photographs, followed by photos taken from 1952 to 1971: landscapes, buildings, animals, bathers, portraits of ordinary people, townsfolk, children, friends of the poet (Elytis, Marina Karagatsi, G. Mavroidis, Aris Konstantinidis), and scenes from Empeirikos's private life with his wife Vivika and his son Leonidas.
Andros is recorded as a poetic place in the 1950s and 1960s by a major writer who elevated the side activity of photography to a systematic high involvement. With this publication, we have a return to Empeirikos's birthplace, a pivotal point in his life and work.
"Andros, from the very first moment I saw it, gave me the impression of a true Paradise. Of course, elsewhere, various other natural beauties enchanted and moved me in my life, but here, on this island, I felt more immediately and deeply, for the first time, the poetry that contains and radiates a place and, also, that a place can mean something beyond what its physical composition objectively presents - namely, that it can correspond to purely subjective terms, to emotions, to internal truths. In Andros, I emphasize, this happened to me for the first time." (Andreas Empeirikos)
