This body of work seeks a metaphysical dimension of human alienation and expresses a social critique within the mundane life of a harbor.
It takes place in the industrial port of Thessalonika, Greece. The setting of huge metallic constructions, massive apersonal buildings and vast empty spaces, in which the human presense was too small and labour was not really apparent, almost non-existent, provided the framework for contemplating social alienation. 'Anthropomorphic' attempts to approach the cry of the individual to make sense of existance, to voice personal difference, against the surpressing and disciplinary tendencies of the ubiquitous, functional rationality of the modern institutions.
Anthropomorphic represents the life of a harbor as a reflection and a metaphor of human societies, whereby the harbor cranes substitute individuals, become the new humans, who are working, parading, feel supervised or having a different personality than their fellow next to them. (The word 'anthropos' in Greek means human). In this way, considering that we actually interpret nature through our own ideas and perspective, these images also serve to question the assumptions of an external natural world preceding anything social.
Elements of social relations informed this project from its beginning. I traveled from Leeds to Thessalonika some time after a group of people were arrested in a Greek town for plain-spotting. So for these photographs to materialise, within a political context of different sensitivities, I had to follow the logic and process of a particular bureaucratic social order.
The photographs were made in slide film and later processed digitally. Scanning artifacts, such as the scanner's patterns and asymmetrical black borders were left as an integral part of the mechanical world represented in these images.