(An English Preface)

This book is a "photographic essay" - that is, an attempt to develop a series of ideas through words and pictures. It was not the intention of the author to compile an album of beautiful photos - but to illustrate concepts. In this sense he calls his photography "visualized thought". He actually tries to make concrete in the senses what was abstract in the mind.

This approach corresponds with one of the basic theses of the book: for a Greek, only concrete things count - abstractions are non-existent. He believes in what he sees. Whatever can be perceived exists. Light conveys being.

According to the Greek poet George Seferis (Nobel Prize 1963), this spontaneous bond with the world is the doing of the Greek light. It brings people closer to things, makes the world more familiar. Alienation is an exotic situation for Greeks. Kafka never lived here.

For Seferis light is even more. It determines our identity. He states in his essays: "I wonder - is it the climate or the race? I think it is the light. There is something in the light that makes us what we are". He also wrote: "In principle, I am a matter of light". This basic idea - about light being the formative force in the making of the Greek character (and history) can be found in many Greek poets, writers and thinkers. Elytis (Nobel 1979) writes: "Light and history in Greece are one and the same thing - the one reproduces the other, the one explains and justifies the other - down to that void which is black". And in another essay. : "To be Greek means to feel and react in a certain way... It is a function immediately related to the drama of light and darkness".

It is a fact: Greek writers and philosophers have had an obsession with light for two thousand years. From Homer (for whom living means "seeing the light of the sun") to Elytis. At first this obsession does not seem justified - since people tend to crave for what they miss, not what they have. Greek light is abundant in Greece. Why should Greeks be so obsessed with it?

Greek light seems to act like a drug: The more you have of it, the more you want. You become addicted to it. It heightens your powers of perception, your awareness of living, your sense of being. Its presence makes you euphoric; its absence depresses.

What makes this light different? It has been described as intense, pure, blinding white. It has been experienced as a mystical revelation. Parmenides has related it to Being and Plato and Plotinus to truth.

The author of this book believes that the word to use in relation to the Greek light is: absolute. It is something in itself. It is probably the only absolute think a human being can really see. This absolute light illuminates a non-absolute world - giving it a semblance of eternity. Because light is absolute - it is also addictive. Humans can never have enough of the absolute. But again, because it is absolute - it is all there is. The limits of light are the limits of life. Besides light, there exists nothing. (Darkness "is" only in a metaphorical way - like zero or nothingness).

Darkness is the absence of light - as death is the absence of life. This is why Greeks throughout their history, were afraid of the Dark. Why they never created a religion or a Mythology trying to explain away death - or, even more, to glorify the passing away. Death for the ancient, as well as the modem Greeks, has always been a black negative thing. Afterlife - should there be one - is slavery in the pitch-black darkness of Hades. No hope of paradise or resurrection. This life is all we have - and its essence is light.

This makes our addiction to light even worse - and our fear of darkness as present as the light. Ours is the anxiety of the rich man - who has much to lose. People believing in Paradise may hope - but we, having paradise here, around us, have everything to lose and nothing to gain. So the only thing we can do is live, live with the utmost intensity, as if every day was the last one. This extravagance of living accounts for the exaggeration in everything Greek. It is also the main force behind Greek tragedy - tragedy being an excess, a "hubris", the glorification of life (and light) in its losing fight against darkness.

But the Greek light is in itself tragic. Since everything includes its negation (as Heraclitus would have said) the Greek absolute light implies (and leads to) total darkness. "If you stretch white you reach black". (Elytis). Seferis writes of "seeing darkness behind the light". And Albert Camus, talking of Greece, mentioned the "black face of the sun' ".

This is what you really see, should you look straight at the Greek sun. A black dot on your retina. No, the Greek sun is not "nice" as tourists often find out. It is a strong barbaric God. It bums your skin your eye and your photographic negatives. There is such a thing as a black sun - photographs in this book try to prove it.

The same is true of the Greek landscape - it is a battleground of light and darkness. There is nothing soft or gentle about it. There are no forests to absorb the light, no mist to tone down contrasts, no green meadows to soften reflections. Everything is hard, bare, naked: rocks and stones and sand and sea-reflecting, magnifying, reacting. Rays clash with stones, light crashes on rocks, the sea blazes back the glare. The light dances everywhere - the shadows are hard and black. It is dazzling and daunting.

This is the light of the Greeks. Strange, almost supernatural. Living constantly - for thousands of years - in this light, has made Greeks what they are: warm, over-confident, over-anxious, contradictory beings. Tragic beings. Within their light they reach the absolute - without it they are reduced to nothingness. There is no in-between for them. It is always either - or. Even their language proves it. "Greek has no chiaroscuro - no shading", writes Elytis.

The author of this book has tried to capture this contrast. Not the static light (much less the trite "tourist" light) but more the dynamic, clashing, moving reality. The fight of sun and shadow, in the landscape, in the city, in the soul of the observer.

Photographs in this book were shot within one year, while the text was being written. Sometimes they inspired thoughts, in other instances they were the product of thoughts. It was a dialectic process - one thing leading to another. The whole book started with a photograph. Equipment used was 35 mm SLR cameras and lenses" slide film. No filters, no cropping. Photographs were shot all over Greece, but, since they aimed at isolating light situations, no landmarks or recognizable landscapes were included.