Nota Kyriazi

I attended Haris Kakarouhas’ Insight workshop in 2017. I’d happened to see some photographs of his and had fallen in love with them. I became almost obsessed with hearing the man who had taken those wonderful pictures talk about the process of photography. I wanted to find out more about how he takes photographs and, of course, to hear what he had to say about my own work. The reason I took the workshop was purely and simply my admiration for his photographs. I joined it without knowing anything about its structure or its content. To start with, I admit, it didn’t suit me. I felt rather awkward with the methods that Haris uses.

Then I came to realise that Haris’ “holistic” approach is essentially an experience. It’s a deeply internal process that happens quite suddenly. For me, it happened one Saturday morning in the forest in Kaisariani. As I was approaching the place for the umpteenth time, three slender trees appeared before me with a wonderful light shimmering unexpectedly through their leaves. Suddenly, everything else around me disappeared. All that was left were those brightly illuminated trees, the joy I felt, and my absolute inner need to capture something that I was experiencing with my whole being. I felt an incredible euphoria, an inner turmoil, a longing to take the picture before it was too late. After a few days, as usual, I brought my photographs to show at the workshop, including that image from Kaisariani. And that was the one that Haris concentrated on. He said, quite simply, “This is truth”. I was thrilled. The fact that he’d selected that particular photograph out of all the others was for me the essence of the workshop. I realised at that moment that Haris focuses on a kind of artistic creation that is deeply interior, which all of us, more or less, carry inside us and which under the right circumstances can become art. This quality can be recognised, can be communicated. It is the hidden thread that runs between the work and the person observing it. The workshop is a framework for cultivating this quality and focusing on it, and for me personally to understand it.

Haris doesn’t give advice on the process of photography. He doesn’t talk about technical issues at all. However, he does talk about what he thinks has been captured in a photograph that touches us, that moves us deeply. He talks about how he thinks such a photograph comes to be. He talks about images through which the photographer essentially encounters himself. He doesn’t distance himself from them in order to study them and photograph them.

Haris attempts to teach the experience of this kind of photography. It’s not easy, by any means, but it’s worth it.