Cela te revient comme un droit de regard, tu es pour l’instant quelqu’un que le dispositif photographique met en demeure de proposer, sur ces images, un grand nombre de récits possibles. Tu n’es pas, d’abord, un sujet qui écrit, qui regarde ou qui lit, tu es celle qui me raconte, toute la nuit et tout le jour : ce qu’elle croit voir en regardant, mais en regardant seulement et toujours de la photographie. Et, à la différence de ce qui se passe avec toute autre "image", l’histoire ici ne précède pas le récit.
Jacques Derrida, lecture de Droit de regards, 1985
Permission to look comes to you as of right, you are for the moment someone empowered by the photographic apparatus to suggest a great number of possible narratives based on these images. You are not, to begin with, a subject who writes, observes or reads, you are the one who tells me stories all day and all night: who narrates what she thinks she sees through looking, but through looking only and always at photographs. And, contrary to what occurs with every other kind of “image”, here narrative is not preceded by history.
Jacques Derrida, a reading of Droit de regards, 1985
John Stathatos was artistic director of the 16th Thessaloniki Fotosynkyria in February-March 2004, and curator of the international group exhibition Ways of Telling: Photography and Narrative at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography plus several satellite solo exhibitions at various venues around the city.
Participating artists
Deborah Baker, Periklis Boutos, Victor Burgin, Dimitris Charissiadis, Gregory Crewdson, Stelios Efstathopoulos, Nan Goldin, Paul Graham, Kai-Olaf Hesse, Stratos Kalafatis, Katerina Kalogeraki, Christos Kalos, Yannis Kontos, Kyun Young Lim, Wendy McMurdo, Vassilis Polychronakis, Yiorgos Prokopiou, George Rodger, Paul Seawright, Julian Stallabrass, Hannah Starkey, Anne Testut, Giuseppe Tornatore, Yiorgos Vafiadakis, Alexis Vassilikos, Qingsong Wang, Patrick Ward, Johanna Weber, Nayia Yiakoumaki, Takis Zerdevas, Nikoletta Zissi