Features
Americans Parade featured in American issue of Whalebone magazine
A photographer visiting from England finds us both divided and united at the same time along parade routes.
Americans Parade in China Newsweek
The feature is interesting as it focuses a lot on the historical culture of different parades as well as America today.
An image from Americans Parade published in Philosophie Magazine, France.
Interview in El Pais
British photographer George Georgiou toured the United States in search of parades, composing a portrait of the different communities that make up the nation, which in turn delves into the loneliness of the individual by GLORIA CRESPO MACLENNAN
Interview and review in ASX by Eugenie Shinkle
The resulting images are immensely detailed. You need a long, slow look to get the measure of them: the landscapes, the pictures-within-pictures, the glances exchanged between spectators, their clothes, their gestures, their expressions. It also takes time to fully appreciate the range and depth of photographic tradition packed into each one. Every image poses the question of American identity not just from the standpoint of our present reality, but from the playbook of iconic images – most of them from the twentieth century – that make up the history of American photography.
Americans Parade: The Faces of the 21st Century by Colin Pantell in PH Museum
We don’t get just one beaded Mardi Gras parade, we get several; there are the beaded celebrants packing the sidewalks in downtown New Orleans, set off against the parade watchers gathering beneath an overpass in a suburb of the same city. The day might be the same but there are also environments, life stories, and urban histories contained within these images that point to a very different experience. In the book, the images are two dimensional, but the faces, surfaces and textures that you see are like little beads of sweat on the page, hinting at the organic depths that lie deep beneath the paper. The manner in which we see, read, and understand images cuts through history and time.
Feature in Photonews, Germany
Americans Parade in Fisheye
Meetings in a divided America. With this parade of Americans, the artist composes a photographic fresco detailing the nuances of these ephemeral communities.
Townsfolk on Parade by Sean O’ Hagan: Observer New review
The British photographer’s new book picturing onlookers at events across the US in 2016 sheds an unexpected light on the fractured nature of contemporary American life
“Americans Parade, from it’s deftly chosen title to its formally democratic approach, is a book that repays close scrutiny. It is a portrait of not one America, but myriad often contradictory Americas. Perhaps, it was ever thus, but those contradictions - of class, race, economics and ideologies - seem starker than ever.
Americans Parade featured in The Atlantic
In Georgiou’s photographs, these celebrations remain outside the frame; his lens stays trained, instead, on the sidelines, and on the spontaneous tableaux assembled there. Some of the watchers captured in his images are clearly driven by passion or commitment. Some appear just curious; others seem deeply bored. Some look like they might disagree with one another. And yet the very existence of each group portrait produces an illusion of unity, as if the people in each frame, at least for that instant, cohere. Maybe an act as basic as standing alongside other people still counts for something. Maybe photographs of us doing this, however fleetingly, count for something too. — David Campany
Book review of Americans Parade by Loring Knoblauch in Collector Daily
“Americans Parade is an inspired example of the power of seeing something obvious from an alternate perspective. Watching the watchers turns out to be surprisingly compelling, and Georgiou’s compilation of disparate parade crowds offers an unexpectedly insightful composite portrait of 21st century America. This single subject photobook essentially catches us off guard, thereby documenting truths about who we are and how we behave that we might not have noticed ourselves.”
PORTRAIT OF A NATION by Max Houghton in B&W Magazine
In this body of work Georgiou employs photography to its best ends: he captures something important, but fleeting, and makes it endure. Through this series of portraits of many varied communities, the achievement of the work at this significant moment in history is no less than the portrait of a nation.
In the company of strangers: A portrait of Americans as they come together on U.S. streets by Olivier Laurent in the Washington Post
An Assignment for the NYT’s Magazine on Basketball in India
Scenes from a crowd by Alice Zoo in the BJP
In his latest project and soon-to-be book, George Georgiou finds anonymity and intimacy along the roadside of American parades
“Georgiou was able to access a surprising kind of intimacy with his multiple subjects: the intimacy of unguarded self-presentation, the purity of revelation that emanates from a person who is unaware of being looked at.”
Where America’s ended up: Corriere della Sera Sette
FaultLines/Turkey/East/West published alongside 8 Turkish writers in Respect magazine, Czech Republic.
StreetView: New York Times Magazine
When I first started working on Americans Parade I showed The NYT’s magazine some of the early parades. They believed in the project and commissioned me to continue working, generously supporting the project until the end. The feature was published on the weekend of Trumps inauguration.
Commission for the NYT’s Magazine on the Chinese economic expansion in Namibia
Assignment for Bloomberg Business Weekly magazine
Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Send Cash.
Western Union built its business on refugees and immigrants. Can it survive the political backlash against them? By Drake Bennet and Lauren Etter
How to steal a River, commission for the NYT’s magazine on illegal sand mining in India.
Black Sea, a commission from the NYT’s magazine for their Voyages issue
‘‘A few years ago, a friend of mine bought a couple of buildings in a little Bulgarian village called Mandritsa. The village is beautiful, and it has incredible fruits and vegetables. I’ve got my own place there now, and that was my destination this summer. I started in Ukraine, where I’ve been working on another project. Along the way, I wanted to revisit some cities by the Black Sea that I hadn’t seen in years. This is one of the poorest regions in Europe, but there is an emerging middle class, and in summer you get people from all over Eastern Europe and Russia coming in for a budget holiday. I’ve mostly seen the Black Sea out of season, when the feeling is more melancholic, but summer changes everything.’’
Interview with Fotoroom
Last Stop — George Georgiou Photographs the Streets of London from aboard Its Buses
54 year-old British photographer George Georgiu introduces us to Last Stop, a body of work he made shooting from London’s world-known buses that is also available as a self-published photobook selected by Martin Amis as one of ten best photobooks of 2015 –
Hello George, thank you for this interview. What are your main interests as a photographer?
I’m generally a fan of a lot of different genres of photography but If I start to look over my work, there are without doubt recurring themes and subjects I keep coming back to. I would say that I am fascinated by public space, particularly urban space and our interaction within that space. The interaction is crucial to me, from a political and social viewpoint but also from the personal and emotional, and how it shapes perception.
How did you get the idea to photograph London from inside its renowned buses?
The work evolved from an earlier project. In 2005 I went to Ukraine to look at life after the Orange Revolution. As the country is going through a transition or a method of transit from one system to another, I thought it would be appropriate to play on this notion of transit by moving through the country on public transport, photographing as people move from home to work, shopping, going out and selling goods around the transport hubs. This allowed me to move through the towns and cities in a random manner, photographing from buses, trolleybuses, trams and trains the daily lives of Ukrainians, moving from the centre to the residential areas and city outskirts and back.
I was curious to see if the images would take on a similar feel if I replicated the approach in another country, so I photographed from buses in Istanbul. Instantly, I noticed that the way people use the public space in Turkey – the way they interact with each other and the environment – was very different. When I moved back to London, my home city, after being a few years away, I was fascinated by how much it had changed. The bus seemed like the perfect way to frame a city, to make something coherent and to encapsulate my ideas.
What was your main intent in taking the Last Stop pictures? What are you trying to communicate with these images?
There were so many ideas floating around in my head. Originally I was thinking about London as a city of migration, the last stop not only for immigrants but also for people from across the UK. A city of dreams and possibilities; but as we all know, these dreams are not so easily realised. As the project evolved, I became more interested in trying to express the experience of the city, how we move through it, share it, coexist as a diverse group of peoples and cultures. The hardest part was what I consider the little soap operas we see everyday in public space, those encounters we witness and perceive as fictions – are they secret lovers or a married couple? etc. It’s a little like when we drive pass an accident on the highway: we glimpse the crashed car and imagine the rest. How we perceive became an important element in the work.
The images of Last Stop seem to straddle street and surveillance photography. How would you describe them?
Surveillance was on my mind when I was making the work and the aesthetic plays with the look of Google Street View. Surveillance in the city is all around us but on the flip side of this is also our sense of invisibility, how we allow ourself to express very private behaviour in public space, like a family argument. I am always amazed how people talk so loudly on their mobile phones in confined spaces, or how in a popular restaurant chain in the USA, I feel like I am sitting in the lounges of 20 different families during meal time. So me sitting and photographing behind the window of the bus is an act of surveillance, invisibility and voyeurism, all inter-related acts of seeing in the city and in photography.
I see Last Stop as straddling street photography, surveillance, landscape and documentary fiction.
Is there anything you realised about London or even humanity while working on Last Stop?
Yes, our ability to share space and coexist.
Did you have any specific references or sources of inspiration in mind for Last Stop?
My main reference and inspiration is my own knowledge and fascination for London over the years. I used to travel around London on buses as a teenager with friends during the school holidays, sometimes with an aim but often just for fun. And over the years I have lived and visited a lot of different neighbourhoods, witnessing the changes that have taken place over the last 40 years.
Other references are more from the narrative construction of movies. I love the opening sequence of Down by Law by Jim Jarmusch and intertwining films like Crash, Magnolia, Traffic and Amores Perros. And finally the 1976 John Smith video, The Girl Chewing Gum shot in Dalston.
Please talk a bit about the Last Stop book.
The design of the book was by far the hardest part of the whole project as it holds together the whole concept of the work and relates to the actual experience of moving through a city.
The essence of the project is that you might take the same route everyday but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street takes on a random nature. To capture this flow, the concertina allows the feel of a bus trip, but more importantly it gives the viewer the opportunity to create their own journeys by spreading the book out and combining different images together. This moves the book away from an author-led linear narrative to one of multiple possibilities.
I struggled with the design and selection for a long time but I felt that I had to take responsibility for the whole project. It was the same with self-publishing and doing a crowd-funding campaign. Because of the expenses of making a concertina book and with all the hand work that it involves, I didn’t want a third party cutting on the production values because of costs. I was lucky that I found a great printing house in Istanbul, MAS matbaa, that worked very closely with me on the technical aspects and helped make the book financially viable.
What have been the main influences on your photography?
Too many to mention. I have been a big fan of photography for well over 30 years and my influences have constantly changed over that time. Outside of photographers, I think my politics, film and my wife, Vanessa Winship.
Who are some of your favourite contemporary photographers?
In the last 4 or 5 years I haven’t engaged in looking at photography so intensely and there are too many photographers to name. Generally, I am a big fan of American photography – artists like Philip Lorca di Corcia, Larry Sultan and all the others from that generation. I like the engagement of South African photographers Guy Tillim and Mikhael Subotzky. In Britain, Paul Graham and Stephen Gill. Of the new generation I am very impressed by the work of Max Pinckers. And finally Vanessa Winship. I have sat and looked at her work for years and I never tire of looking at its keen poetic quality.
Last Stop feature in D2
British photographer George Georgiou’s haunting images of modern Turkey show a country of marked contrasts.
Review of Fault Lines in Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Felicia Feaster
Whether in his landscapes or portraits, Georgiou has a way of wrapping his subjects with devouring expanses of space — lots of sky, mountain ranges and long dusty roads that emphasize a feeling of loneliness that weighs heavily in his photographs.
Last Stop featured in M Le Monde magazine
Last Stop featured in Time Lightbox by Sonia van Gilder Cooke
“To be sure, London's council estates and suburbs lack the obvious appeal of its famous monuments. But Georgiou says the city is defined as much by transition as tradition.”
Last Stop in Professional Photographer
“Once you focus, you know what you’re looking for,” he begins. “I started to look for different images, and that was what pushed me to carry on looking for the scenes that I call micro dramas, little soap operas where there’s a communication between people and you’re not quite sure what’s going on in those pictures. They have narratives but the narratives are open to interpretation.”
My work from Leicester featured in Caravan.
Leicester feature for Russian Reporter
A few weeks ago I shot a feature for Russian Reporter on Leicester, the 10th largest city in the UK.
The story was based on the prediction that Leicester will become the first city in the UK with a non-white majority. I was free to explore and interpret this story as I saw it.
Turkey in Epsilon Magazine, Greece
Newsweek
Newsweek used my triptychs from Istanbul in the way they are intended to be seen, good to see a magazine respected the photographers vision.
NYT’s LENS
“Through a series of haunting architectural and landscape scenes of Turkey’s rush toward modern-isation — and the resulting tension between the secular and the modern — George Georgiou has visually put his finger on a kind of listless alienation which at times can seem to pervade globalised society. Turkey, traditionally a bridge between East and West, seemed a logical choice for such a cautionary vision.
His latest book, “Fault Lines: Turkey From East to West” (Schilt Publishing), forces us to consider not so much the emotions that connect us, but rather the spaces that separate us.” By Adam Stoltman
Fault Lines in 24 magazine, Italy
Fault Lines featured in the New Yorker
Fault Lines in the Sunday Times, UK
The Contact Sheet by Steve Crist
I have a contact sheet and the selected image in a new book on the contact sheet.
Featuring a diverse collection of original contact sheets from over forty international photographers, The Contact Sheet allows in-depth insight into the subject matter and the photographic process -- often revealing a deeper story that has not been told.
Featuring over forty international photographers, including: William Claxton, Chuck Close, Michel Comte, Anton Corbijn, Imogen Cunningham, David Doubilet, Elliot Erwitt, Nan Goldin, George Georgiou, Nadav Kander, Art Kane, David Hume Kennerly, Dorothea Lange, Saul Leiter, Peter Lindbergh, Jerry McMillan, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Arnold Newman, Paul Outerbridge, Martin Parr, Ed Ruscha, Julius Shulman, Jeanloup Sieff, Jerry Uelsmann and William Wegman
Fault Lines in BJP Parallel Lines by Colin Pantall
“ ‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk’, goes the saying. George Georgiou’s work, however, reveals a more complex sense of national identity, struggling to reconcile it’s multiple personalities”
In the shadow of the bear featured in FT magazine
Interview in Hot shoe magazine
20 page feature of Fault lines/Turkey/East/West in Geo magazine, Germany
Fault Lines in Rear View Mirror
Last Friday in Milan a beautiful new Italian photography magazine was launched called Rear View Mirror, published by Postcart.
It features Pieter Ten Hoopen, George Georgiou, Marta Sarlo, Agnes Dherbeys, Alisa Resnik and Massimo Sciacca plu a couple of interviews including Guy Tillim
Turkey in Kapa Magazine, Greece
Transit Ukraine in La Vie
Transit ukraine Featured in Foto 8 magazine