From Ansel Adams' dramatic black and white landscapes to the prettified colour pictures in the National Geographic, landscape photography has generally been driven by an urge to discover and record a lost natural paradise.

Urban landscapes, on the other hand, rarely escape from the stereotyped pattern of either the grey stressfulness of modern mega-cities or the arted-up folklore of the urban architectural heritage, new and old.

By contrast and yet in combination with all these, Eleni Barka's camera focuses on the infinity of natural details that may be found within the boundaries of the modern metropolis. Conscious of the magnitude of man's intervention on the natural environment, Barka raises a voice of protest, turning the spotlight of publicity not on the sterile vegetation of modern natural/artificial parks but rather on the plants that, in stubborn resistance to human will, continue to thrust up through the cracks in the levelling concrete of our lives.

On the other hand, her images of this "natural insurrection" take place within an imposing but deserted urban landscape, where the worrying total absence of any human element brings to mind - prophetically - scenes of a post-nuclear age.

Alexandros Avramidis