Periplus: Magnum Photographers in Contemporary Greece

On the occasion of the Olympic Games of 2004, the Hellenic Cultural Heritage Organisation - Cultural Olympiad asked the famous photographic agency Magnum Photos to prepare a portrait of contemporary Greece. Famous photographers of the international photo reportage visited Greece, traveled around researcging. Each of them following his own path recorded what they came across. The curator Sylviane De Decker-Heftler comments about the exhibition:
"A whole host of photographic approaches and eyes, with Greece as the sole territory of visual quest. With successive touches, the Magnum photographers suggest things without demonstrating them, and end up giving us an anti-portrait of Greece--much more evocative than any encyclopaedia of images. Their written accounts, somewhere between make-believe and reality, raise the issue of representing reality, and forcefully introduce the relevance of the fragment as a recording method."

As a result of this project, this big exhibition and the accompanying catalogue is presented for the first time at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. The exhibition will be presented at the Benaki Museum the following summer participating in the Cultural Olympiad 's shows of Athens 2004.

The exhibition Periplous is a Cultural Olympiad's part of events in collaboration with Magnum Photos.