The Rhodope, a magical mountain range strewn with castles, churches, mosques, mansions, huts, sheepfolds, dry stone walls, and bridges. With landscapes of unparalleled natural beauty, featuring unexpected flora and fauna. However, the most beautiful element of it is the human aspect. Smiles, treats, hospitality from people of different cultures, customs, traditions, religions, and practices. A place where different populations coexist, a harmonious diversity of individuals rarely encountered.
The Rhodope is vast and diverse, transcending the borders of the prefecture and the country. To be "covered", it needs people, hands, eyes, fuel. Thus, 15 photographers gathered under the initiative of the Creative Photography Center of Thrace and collaborated. A rare achievement in a land of divisions, rare even for this quintessentially solitary practice.
It is well known among photographers that you cannot truly capture a place if you only travel through it. Because then, at best, you photograph your journey, making a random sampling at the moment you passed through. A place has duration, it has hidden corners that are not visible from the road, it has people who must trust you, local customs that vary from village to village, seasonal changes that take time/years to be captured.
These images are not information, or not just information. Each of them individually, and even more so as a whole, represents the interpretation of a close, familiar, beloved place, which is not captured as picturesque. The picturesque is for tourists, while here we deal with locals.
Yet, where this collective work transcends the informational image is not so much when viewing the landscape from afar but when it literally and metaphorically enters it. It moves into an interpretation that varies morphologically due to the uniqueness of each group member but homogenizes through the common perspective. The images begin to transcend description, intertwining in branches, burrowing under roots, stumbling over fallen trunks.
They are surprised by a small explosion of color, speaking to wind-battered trees struggling to stand tall. They start to hear rustling, encounter ghosts in the fog, are startled by eerie carcasses. The forest transforms from enchanting to enchanted. And when it whitens and freezes in winter, the photographic wonders continue. The snowy images are perhaps the most characteristic achievement of this collection.
