An Expat’s Eye on Greece

By Rena Silverman Nov. 30, 2015

The New York Times

Dimitri Melios believes that people put reality into boxes. Most, he says, have a stereotypical conception of different parts of the world. When they think of India, they think of the Taj Mahal. And when they think of his native Greece, they think of sunny Mediterranean beaches.

“Most people go to Greece from this country or elsewhere,” he said from his home in Manhattan. “They just go to a couple of specific destinations. Everybody goes to Mykonos or Santorini, and that’s the kind of image people associate with the country.”

Although some of the bluest waters have recently served as backdrops for harrowing portraits of the refugee crisis — and at times, the economic crisis — Mr. Mellos, who moved to New York from Athens in 2005, has dug up nearly a decade of landscapes from his trips home. Almost all were taken in the countryside. All show a different narrative. There are few beaches there; instead there is a truck in snow or a scene with mountains half-hidden by clouds. With a nod to William Eggleston’s “Guide,” he calls his series “An Illustrated Guide to Greece.”

“Obviously, there is a mix,” he said. “I have seascapes, but even for those, I tried to consciously undermine the perceived wisdom about what Greece looks like.”

But, while driving around looking for images that would dispel notions that Greece consists only of sparkling architecture stacked along the sunny coasts, Mr. Mellos discovered something else.

“I was driving around in the rural areas, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and I started noticing all these traces left by humans,” he said.

Near Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece and home of the ancient gods, Mr. Mellos took a picture of a leaning tree against a sky of low clouds. A closer look shows something strange at the trunk: a couple of seats plucked from a car (photo below).

“There was a very nice view from where the seats are, so obviously somebody kept going back to just sit down and enjoy the view and they put those car seats there to be more comfortable,” he said.

In Meteora, a Unesco World Heritage Site, where some might aim to capture the famous group of Greek monasteries, Mr. Mellos photographed a pay phone surrounded by mountains and glowing in the light. He thought the pay phone was newly installed.

By the country’s northwestern border, where some might go for the lakes of Prespa, Mr. Mellos photographed a gas pump next to two identical statues standing in contrapposto. Mr. Mellos says he thinks they were decorative and placed by a nearby gas station to liven up the space.

“I just love the fact that clearly somebody intentionally set them up next to the air pump,” he said. “And again I thought, ‘That was a beautiful combination and in a way bad taste.’ But also, in a way, it was very touching that the gas station owner or whoever wanted to beautify that little spot.”

These “creative interventions in the landscape” of Greece, which include only a few images of people as the sole subjects, are a shift from Mr. Mellos’s busy New York street scenes.

“In my street work, a lot of the photos are tilted, they’re more chaotic,” he said. “The main punctum of the photo is not necessarily in the center of the frame. And for these photos I tried to reverse that and actually have a very straightforward kind of approach because I thought that fit the content in a way.”

His approach, which differs greatly for each genre, is informed somewhat by control.

“In street photography, you control nothing apart from positioning your body in space and pushing the button,” he said. “You only have control over the framing and the exact moment of taking the photo. With landscapes, the subject is clearly more tame. It’s not going anywhere, and there is more time to decide how to take the photo. In that sense, I think that the decision-making process is slightly more conscious when it comes to the landscapes.”

While Mr. Mellos continues to shoot the streets of New York — where he works as a psychologist at Jacobi Hospital — he hopes to continue his Greek guide in the future, perhaps with a medium-format camera, versus the Nikon FM2 he mostly used before.

And, now that he is a New Yorker, he views his country completely from the outside, which he sees as an added benefit.

“I most definitely saw Greece differently when returning as an expat of sorts,” he said. “It was as if my eyes had suddenly opened to a whole new world.”