John Demos

Panigiria (s Fanny Boucher) / výstava

Biography

John Demos (Yiannis Dimou) (*1944, Thessaloniki, Greece) studied Art History at the University of Chicago and received a Master of Fine Arts in 1969. Upon returning to Greece, he taught photography at the Doxiades Institute, and Art History and Humanities at the American Academy of the Community Schools of Athens. In 1976 he published his first body of photographic work under the title The Greece That Is Passing. Along with four other photographers, he then forms and runs the Athens Centre of Photography. In 1986 he stops teaching and with his wife Bernardine, creates the agency Apeiron Photos to represent major international photographers and agencies such as Magnum, Rapho, Sygma and others, on the Greek editorial market.
The Greek Ministry of Culture appoints him Artistic Director of the Photographic Centre of Skopelos from 1996–1999, in which position he organises exhibitions and creates an International Photography Festival. Apeiron, as a Greek publisher, becomes a member of the European Publishers Award in Photography. At the same time, he devotes himself to his next photographic project on faith, which culminates in the book Shadows of Silence, published in 2002. This work is later exhibited extensively in Europe, Argentina and China, as well as in Houston and Moscow.
In 2000, he creates and sets up the new Rizarios Exhibition Centre in Monodendri, Epirus. In 2008 he curates and publishes, as Apeiron Photos, in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, the large retrospective of Josef Koudelka. At the same time, Actes Sud publishes his colour work from 1990–1991 in John Demos / Albanie… On the Cusp of Change. Both the Albania colour work and his black-and-white work from Shadows of Silence are exhibited at the International Festival of Photography in Arles, France, in the summer of 2008.
Finally, his latest work of 20 years on Trees, titled Pnoe Dendron receives the highest honour in 2022 by the Chinese International Ping Yao Photo Festival, and the city of Ping Yao.
John Demos’ work has been exhibited worldwide in festivals, museums, and galleries. His work is represented in major collections, including the Biblioteque Nationale, the Maison Europeene de la Photographie, and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Gulbenkian in Portugal, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, as well as in private collections.