An emotional journey
A new book of photographs looks into the lives of nine women who helped shape the life of their photographer
Aunts, the latest book of photographs by Menelaos Pittas, is full of poetry and emotions, it is a journey through the lives of nine women who have had a strong influence on his life. They are all Cypriots range from 76 to 105.
“Aunt Aliki looks like a porcelain doll,” writes Pittas. Korinna is “a rare, mythological species, the rarest orchid in the Mediterranean”; Niki “asks for nothing”; Irinia “feels the need to beg forgiveness for being alive at all”; Nafsika “gives the impression of a grandmother with a future”; Thalia “married a fighter, on the run from the colonial authorities”; Irini is always “in the company of the angels”; Maroulla is “the ultimate taste expert”; and Mary, for 105 years, “has lived and nursed the pain of the world’s tormented souls”.
“Not all of them are my real aunts,” explains the author, who apart from being an accomplished photographer is also one of directors of the well-known Pittas Diary Industries. “But they are all very close to me and my family, and they have been in my life for many, many years. One way or the other I have been brought up by them, and for a long time I had been planning to take their photographs and record their uniqueness and beauty. Somehow it always got postponed. Then, one day when I was abroad, my mother called and said that one of them had died and I suddenly realised that I couldn’t postpone it any more. This is how the project started. It took me four years. I did it all in my spare time and just finished three months ago.”
The book consists of several different approaches to its subjects, all skilfully blended together to give a touching portrait of the old ladies. To start with, there are contemporary photographs of them and their surroundings by Pittas and also accompanied by their short outline of each. Then there are various old pictures showing the same women in their youth, full of beauty and energy, with their families and friends. And finally, there are images of the aunts cooking their favourite traditional Cypriot food.
“We all know how old people are,” Pittas says. “They always have their favourite places to sit, surrounded by all the things that are important to them. To really show my aunts, I decided I needed to learn as much as possible about such spaces in their lives, and trace the associations between them and their favourite objects and pictures.
For weeks I went through their private albums to select the pictures. I must have seen more than 2,000 of them and chose about 120 to 150 for each aunt. Then I started sitting in their private spaces trying to record their favourite objects and the connection between them and their favourite pictures. I called it ‘communication with departed souls’. This was the most interesting part. But the most difficult part was writing something. After all I am not a writer. I am a photographer. So it took me a month for each of the texts.
“And through all this process, each of my aunts would keep on asking: ‘Why me?’ They thought there was nothing special in them to make such a big fuss about or for anybody to be interested in, but as we went along they changed and started to appreciate themselves more. So it was an exercise for both of us. I got to know them better and they started to look at themselves in a different way. This project gave my aunts a sense of purpose again and a sense of being something precious. And I really think they are very precious. Each of them in her very own way.”
The texts Pittas wrote about his aunts are more impressionistic than descriptive and he says that what he really strived to achieve while composing them was to convey an essence of the old ladies’ existence rather than the exact stories of their lives.
“Let’s take my aunt Irinia for example, who is now 97,” he says. “When she was young she had a very close friend whom she lost at a very early age. Whatever I tried to make out of Irinia I could see that this association with her friend was very strong. I went around to photograph Irinia’s personal space and I was lying on her bed looking at this little portrait of her friend that she had next to her bed for 50 years, and I realised that she must have spent hours talking with her. And I understood that this was her essence – the relationship with this woman whom she lost long time ago. OK, after that Irinia went on. She was a very good teacher. She had a family. She is a respectable grandmother but…
“The same goes for Niki. Niki is very strange. Niki can live with almost nothing. She is very minimalist. Her essence is about having no demands, and she has this fantastic way of saying: ‘I am not asking for anything. The only thing I am asking from God is to give me a little corner in paradise’.
“I think what I am trying to say is that for every woman you can find this specific characteristic of hers that will describe her in just a few words. For example, my aunt Korinna, who illustrated a book on Cyprus orchids, had a problem with the author of the book who didn’t give her the proper credit, making her very upset. So I thought that the way to make Korinna feel good would be to devise a story in which she would be a kind of orchid. She felt very weird when I read the text to her but after a while she accepted it. It’s better than writing something like ‘my aunt Korinna makes very good cookies’.
“Or aunt Mary, who is 105-year-old. She still lives on her own. She has no maid. She was a nurse all her life so she knows how to take care of herself. There are times when she feels lonely but she is still going strong. Mary was probably the first woman in Cyprus to buy a car. She sold her only piece of land to buy it. I asked her: ‘Aunt, wasn’t that crazy, you had only this one piece of land and you exchanged it for a car?’ And she thought for a while and then she said: ‘But in a car you can pose’.
“The lessons you learn from these people are tremendous. How can a person live on her own and see nobody for a week or so? How does she still keep her sanity? I imagine they talk to all these people who have been close to them throughout the years but are dead now. For example, when I was talking to Mary, she would suddenly turn to the picture of her husband and say ‘Don’t you agree?’, and I would suddenly realise that there were more people in this room.”
Most of the old photographs in the book come from the 1930s and were taken by the same person, Pittas’ uncle Iraklis Pantelides, who was one of the first amateur photographers in Cyprus.
“That is why the quality of the pictures is so good. Iraklis had a good eye. He would go around taking pictures of relatives but also had an opinion about photography, a very personal opinion, and valued aesthetic above all. And from the way they all are in these photos, all dressed up, you can also see that it was an event to be photographed. Not like today when you just get your mobile out and snap a picture. Back then it was something special. You would even go to extremes. I have a picture of one of my aunts, Nafsika, sitting on a tree and holding a baby. It is not her baby. But she did it because she wanted to be photographed. Or another one with her and her husband kissing passionately. She would go to these special places with my uncle when they were young and in love and they would take a camera with them and it would give them about ten seconds to get themselves into a pose. And they were planning their poses. Not like nowadays when everything is standardised and similar to each other.”
Aunts is not the first photographic project of the 48-year-old businessman who has been taking photographs in his spare time for last 30 years. Before focussing on this subject he tackled several others, including n
ature and old Byzantine icons.
“I would call myself a very personal photographer,” he says. “I choose my themes according to the psychological mood I am in. Usually they take me two to three years. The first book I did was when I lost my father. I was fascinated by the subject of death and at the same time strongly involved in the ecological movement. So I chose death as the way to lead to a polemic about how to protect nature.
“Then I got married and the children came along and everything changed,” Pittas continues. “I made this project of going around with the children and photographing little creatures. And then another project came when the children got a bit older. We used to go to the Athalassa Park and we developed this association with the trees and that was the third book, which, again, was connected with the state I was in.
“Then I got into a period of seeking spirituality. I guess I had a midlife crisis. I started visiting various monasteries in Cyprus and got closer to one of my aunts, Irini, a very spiritual person who has been through a lot in her life but never complained about anything. She had a son who was handicapped and she acted as if there was nothing wrong. The boy died at the age of 27. At that time I got a big fixation with Byzantine icons so I would go around photographing them and discussing with iconographers about differences between a good and bad icon. That was the subject of the fourth book. And then came Aunts.
“The two next projects I am planning come from the last one. One goes back to what Niki said about a little corner in paradise. I have thought about it and decided to challenge myself and not to go outside but stay in my house and work on the association between light that comes in, the shadow and the limited space. I believe that photography is not about going around looking for an interesting theme, it is rather something you have in your head and you express it. That is why I am trying to challenge myself now with the argument that I can make pictures in a very limited space. And the other project is to gather all pictures by Pantelides and record him as an amateur photographer of Cyprus.”
Asked how he finds time for all these projects that, after all, have nothing to do with cheese production, Pittas laughs. “This is the only thing I do in my spare time,” he says. “I don’t watch television. I don’t go to football matches. The two books I did with the children were when they were at the age when there was a very close association with them, between three and 10. That is why I developed these two projects so I could do them together with them, be close to my family and not to have to give up photography. Now they are more independent I have more time. And my wife often comes with me anyway, and she is a very independent person. And yes, I am quite busy but we all need something to escape to from the headaches of business and this is what photography has always been for me – a way of life and an escape.”
Aunts and other books by Menelaos Pittas are available from Moufflon Bookshops
