My brother Charles and I first found ourselves in Greece at the end of July 1954. Charles was invited to the country by his university friend, Petros Nomikos. I, being the younger brother, followed him.

A few days after our arrival in Athens, Petros informed us that he would take us to his home island, Santorini. We drove to Piraeus and boarded the Miaoulis. Unlike the other ancient steamships of the Greek commercial fleet—most of which had been purchased second and third hand from Northern Europe—the Miaoulis was brand new: The Italian government had ceded it to Greece as war reparations. After a calm overnight journey, we entered the Caldera, which I would later learn is the largest marine caldera on the planet.

When Charles and I first arrived on the island, we were told that its population was around 12,000 residents, mostly farming families growing grapes, tomatoes, or wheat; also fishermen, quarry workers, and sailors, who worked as crew or captains on ships that traveled the world under the Greek flag. The initial core of the island was made of non-volcanic limestone and marble, but during the last 600,000 years, multiple volcanic activity created or destroyed whole pieces of land, leaving today five islands and islets above the sea's surface. Three are fragments of the aforementioned ancient volcano which collapsed in the 16th century B.C.

In 2006, I exhibited a series of these photographs I took in the 1950s in Fira. I remember an elderly woman who broke down in tears. In those times, she told me, the island's inhabitants still said good morning to each other and offered a glass of water to their neighbor. This sense of community disappeared with the high demands and pressures of commerce, she added. It vanished—just like on Mykonos—the old hard way of life that had shaped the character of the Santorini people for generations.

The dramatic changes in the personality and fate of the island over the past 65 years led Margarita and me to take action, to document in words and images a Santorini that no longer exists.

From the foreword by Robert A. McCabe