Possible/Impossible: Aporias

This book constitutes the "portrayal" of a decade of photography by Yannis Kontos, a portrayal unbounded in geographic, chronologic or historic terms. It opens with the savage but calculated amputation of limbs of innocent people in Sierra Leone. It closes with photographs of the mad victims of neglect in a Serbian hospital. Between these sections we are introduced to a world defined by paradox and (logical) inconsistencies: a world rife with aporias. Aporias, from the ancient greek ‘a-poros’, is defined as “a problem or difficulty arising from an awareness of opposing or incompatible views”: an undermining of logic and source of ‘upset’ to the reader-spectator’s expectations. Yannis Kontos portrays a world which is neither simple nor predestined, but defined in equal shares by progress and withdrawal, ascension and collapse, and where even these concepts could be interpreted in different ways. Scenes of protest or displays of hate, scenes of prayer or displays of devotion and worship, Saddam Hussein’s official address to the public on Iraqi State TV screening to an empty room, ruins, charred remains in the aftermath of disaster provide the framework for the human drama taking place at the moment of the photographer’s click. Together with the Iraqi leader’s monuments or the cities of former-Yugoslavia, the certainties of this world seem to all but disintegrate…
Editing and text by Penelope Petsinis and Thanassis Moutsopoulos. Prologue by John G. Morris.