Voula Papaioannou, Dimitris Harisiadis, Costas Balafas - three photographers who each made his or her own distinctive mark on the decades, so difficult for Greece, from the 1940's to the 1960's. This exhibition, Faces in the Shadow, brings together sixty-six photographs representing the vital moments in the encounter between these photographers and their fellow men - experiencing the horror of war, enduring hunger and poverty, struggling to rebuild their homes and return to some form of ordinary life. In their faces we read their own, individual histories, as well as the photographers' vision of life and humanity. These are artists who use their photographs to describe, to narrate and to illustrate everyday moments or special events, in the profound conviction that the medium of photography is able to capture human nature and to represent ideas and feelings such as pain, tenderness, endurance or dignity. They believe that through their photographs they can change the world, arouse our interest and emotion, awaken our conscience.

And it is precisely these convictions which endow this kind of photography - what we call humanist photography - with its own, special character. It is the product of the photographer's eye, but also his compassion, his optimism, his faith in human values. And it is in this that these photographs differ from all the others which also have as their subject man and the various situations he lives through.

The photographs chosen for this exhibition were taken in different circumstances; in the case of Voula Papaioannou and Dimitris Harisiadis, most were taken in the course of their work as photographic correspondents. Those of Costas Balafas, on the other hand, are the product of a more solitary career, an attitude to life, a unique photographic instinct. What the three photographers share is the quality of their work; all three can be counted among the humanist photographers and their work is perhaps to be regarded as the most important chapter in the history of modern Greek photography.

A contemporary reading of these works must necessarily be approached through the spectrum of a contemporary view of the relationship between photograph and reality, a view which is significantly different from that which was prevalent at the time these photographs were taken. We now tend to view photographs with a certain suspicion, a feeling of scepticism, and this has resulted in a gradual corrosion of the special relationship between the photographic image and the subject photographed.

Yet why is it that everything we now understand about the relationship between photography and reality cannot take away the delight we feel in the photographic images of Voula Papaioannou, Dimitris Harisiadis and Costas Balafas? Perhaps it has something to do with the mystery of their origins and the questions they address to us. Because what in fact are these photographs? Are they documentary records of events or subjective viewpoints? What do we learn from them about the reality they depict and the events which form their context? How do we come to terms with the sense of guilt when we catch ourselves appreciating the beauty in a suffering face? How is it possible for a face, an expression or a gesture to epitomise ideas and function as a vehicle for human expression, transcending the specific presence of the photographed subject? Perhaps in the end the charm they possess for us lies in precisely these contradictions, and in the ambivalence of vision which they entail.

Costis Antoniadis