Giving voice to a vanished world

‘We said everything there was to say. We lived. It’s over now. Let’s eat in silence.’ A couple pictured having dinner in Graz, Austria, in 1986. [Constantinos Pittas]

Sitting across from him today, the resemblance to his self-portraits from the 1980s remains unmistakable. Yet time has left its mark. His once-dark curls are now cropped short and mostly gray, while his penetrating gaze has grown calmer and more contemplative, suggesting a man who has exchanged youthful urgency for a more reflective understanding of life.

“Everything began with the many guided tours I gave in 2016 during my exhibition at the Benaki Museum,” photographer Constantinos (also stylized Constantin) Pittas says of his latest book project. “I shared with visitors the stories behind the photographs – stories from the final years of the Cold War, as well as those of the people depicted in them.”

“Over time I realized I had created something more than simple commentary on the photographs,” he says of the fragments of memory, lived experience, fleeting thoughts and brief narratives he had jotted down.

“A dialogue emerged between text and image, and together these two elements produced something that did not exist when either stood alone.”

Published by Kichli Publications, the 280-page volume “Fotografia” (Photography) brings together 135 black-and-white photographs and 120 short texts, printed in high-quality duotone. The result is a tightly knit visual and literary narrative, set against two intertwined backdrops: his native Athens and his journeys across a divided Europe during the 1980s.

The portraits, often taken discreetly from waist level with a pocket-sized German Minox 35 GT, capture ordinary people with striking immediacy. Weathered faces, searching gazes and unposed expressions convey fatigue, dignity and everyday emotional truth.

The Athens photographs possess a charming, innocent quality, perhaps accentuated by the patina of time. Pittas encounters his subjects in scruffy streets, offbeat shops, busy open-air markets, dim cinema theaters, clamorous election rallies and hushed archaeological sites.

The same sense of a vanished world that permeates these images also runs through his chapter on Cold War Europe. But it is in these portraits of Western and Eastern Europeans that Pittas’ work reaches its greatest emotional depth. Whether photographed in Venice, Berlin, Bucharest, or Prague – and despite their different contexts – his subjects appear connected by shared concerns and vulnerabilities.

A self-portrait by Constantinos Pittas in communist-era Romania. [Constantinos Pittas]

Abrupt end

Undertaken by a curious and idealistic 20-something driven by what he now describes as a “naive ambition” to unite ordinary people on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Pittas’ European wanderings came to an abrupt end in 1989 with the collapse of the communist bloc. His archive of roughly 30,000 negatives remained stored away and largely forgotten for years before being somewhat accidentally rediscovered, revisited and presented to the public in a widely acclaimed exhibition at the Benaki Museum 10 years ago.

What began as instinctive, deeply emotional street photography had by that time evolved into something closer to social documentary. Seen today, the photographs function not only as records of particular moments and places but also as a visual chronicle of a Europe in transition.

Four decades since he first set off in his humble Pony, Pittas continues to pursue his dream of sharing his archive through publications – “Fotografia” will, he hopes, be followed by a second volume next year – and exhibitions in the countries he traveled through in the 1980s.

“I was there when it all happened,” he says of the days when the Berlin Wall was crumbling into souvenirs and Europe was changing before his eyes.