On Saturday December 18, 1954, while travelling in the region of ancient Phoenicia, George Seferis made the following entry in his journal: "We stopped a little below Amshit and watched the sun plunge into the calm depths of the Phoenician sea; because from time to time one has to see things clearly -I mean as through a properly focused camera- ..."
Seferis' need to see things clearly - the places, the events and the people that marked his journey through life - is perhaps the main formative power behind his work, of one substance with the desire to "speak simply" that he expressed in a poem written in 1942, during the war years. And just how well focused his camera often was is something the visitor has an opportunity to see in this present exhibition, a small but representative sample of the poet's long and fertile interest in the art of photography.
Following gracious donations by Maro Seferi in 1984 and Anna Lontou in 1999, the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece is now the repository of the poet's entire photographic archives. This collection of more than twenty-five hundred negatives of photographs taken by Seferis between 1920, when he was still a student in Paris, and the last year of his life (1971) represents more than half a century of photography.
This current exhibition, mounted by the Cultural Foundation as its contribution to the Year of Seferis, presents 82 contemporary prints produced from original negatives of photographs taken by Seferis. It has been designed to reveal another side of the poet - George Seferis, photographer - rather than to narrate his life or to illustrate his poetry through his own photographs. But his images, as they may more fittingly be called, impose upon our imaginations with the same discreet power of persuasion that his best poems have for decades exercised upon us.
