At first look, the pictures in “7 a.m. – 3 p.m.” appear to come back from one other lifetime: smoke curling over cluttered desks, towers of paper on the verge of collapsing, faces half-lit by fluorescent lamps. They belong to the Nineties, however they appear older. They are like fragments from a dream about paperwork itself. The man behind the digital camera, Michalis Patsouras, wasn’t only a customer, he was a part of the system he was documenting.
These black-and-white pictures have been as soon as forgotten negatives in a drawer, however now, practically 30 years later, they’ve returned as a photobook revealed by Hyper Hypo. The title, “7 a.m. – 3 p.m.,” refers back to the Greek public sector’s working hours, however the e-book’s content material opens a deeper inquiry into the character of paperwork, the gradual metabolism of establishments, and the way in which reminiscence is elicited by objects and faces.
A quiet riot with a Leica
After ending highschool, Patsouras – the son of a army officer usually transferred round Greece – discovered himself in Didymoteicho, a sleepy city close to the Turkish border. His introduction to pictures was unintentional: a dusty darkroom equipment found in a loft, a half-forgotten Olympus Pen EES-2, and an adolescent on the lookout for escape. “Once I started developing film,” he remembers, “I was fascinated. I decided I wanted to become a photographer.”
He moved to Athens to review on the Focus School of Photography, residing within the downtown neighborhood of Petralona. Through a well-meaning uncle “who knew the ins and outs of the public sector,” he was supplied a gradual job. “He said: ‘Why don’t you work in the ministry? You’ll earn some money, pay for school, and you won’t have to work too hard.’ And that’s how I entered the public sector – completely by accident.”
The irony is obvious: an aspiring artist contained in the machine. But as a substitute of rejecting the system, Patsouras turned his lens inward, photographing it from inside. He discovered rhythm, melancholy, and quiet magnificence.
His early years as a machine technician gave him entry to each nook of the constructing – the Ministry of Commerce on Chalkokondyli Street, an interwar modernist construction designed by Munich-educated architect Emmanouil Kriezis. “I went from office to office, fixing typewriters, photocopiers, and fax machines,” he remembers. “When I finished, I’d take a picture.”
His digital camera was a Leica M6, loaded with Kodak Tri-X movie and developed with HD-110 – a chemical developer as soon as utilized by Ansel Adams. The mixture gave his pictures a particular, grainy texture – “almost muddy,” he says – with the tender contrasts of fluorescent mild. “If I had perfect grays and whites, it would have looked like something else. I wanted that atmosphere – the feeling of the fluorescent lamp.”
He sought to seize the rhythm of the day between 7 a.m. and three p.m. – the state’s working heartbeat – with none staging, use of flash or different synthetic means.
The environment of paper and smoke
There is one thing common about this venture because the ministry turns into a stage for contemporary life: the rituals of routine, the gradual grind of methods, the uninteresting choreography of individuals certain by paperwork. But it is usually unmistakably Greek – that peculiar mix of absurdity, endurance and humor that animates on a regular basis life.
The pictures vary from the mundane to the surreal: piles of folders on dented steel cabinets, workers smoking behind stacks of varieties, a clerk ascending a Kafkaesque staircase with a stack of paperwork, a person pedaling a stationary bike in a basement, crowds spilling onto the road after a bomb scare (“bomb hoaxes somehow always happened after 12 p.m.,” Patsouras jokes, hinting at an inside job). Together they type a type of bureaucratic fresco – an anatomy of public life amid the timid transition into the digital period.
“It was the height of Greek bureaucracy,” Patsouras says. “Everywhere you looked, people were carrying papers, pushing trolleys full of folders. In the corridors, cabinets overflowed with documents. In the basements, Dexion industrial shelves were packed with files bound with string.”
He insists his work was by no means meant as a denunciation. “It’s easy to judge – to say, look how bored they are. But it wasn’t their fault. Everyone does the same when there’s no motivation. It’s how the system works.”
Indeed, there’s a wierd tenderness in these pictures: fatigue, sure, but in addition quiet humanity. The manner a person leans over a desk; a clerk scratching his head as he cross-checks an countless roll of sticker labels; the small feast of pastries shared amongst colleagues.
For Patsouras, the problem was each aesthetic and moral. “Every time I lifted the camera, I knew I had only one shot,” he says. “We learned from Winogrand and Cartier-Bresson – don’t crop, get the frame right. That limitation made us better.” With time, he turned invisible. “When people see you won’t give up what you are doing, when they stop noticing you, that’s when you capture the real moment.”
Life contained in the machine
Among the pictures is a self-portrait: the photographer’s younger reflection within the mirror of a ministry elevator, digital camera in hand. If “7 a.m. – 3 p.m.” has a story, it’s the story of a younger man realizing that the system he’s documenting can be consuming him. After just a few years, Patsouras was transferred from his roaming technical put up to a desk job within the ministry’s procurement division. “That’s when I felt I would die there,” he admits. “As a technician, I could move everywhere. As an office clerk, I was confined. That’s when I decided to leave.”
He accomplished the venture round 1998 – two years earlier than resigning from the ministry. “I told myself, once it’s finished, I’ll go.” The negatives have been saved away, quietly growing older by the nation’s transformations: the millennium, the increase years, the monetary disaster of the 2010s, the rise of digitization and the false promise of “Greece 2.0.”
There is a way of Greek tragedy within the characters, as they yield to their each day routines, seemingly oblivious to the modifications looming forward. Austerity measures, wage cuts, and administrative reforms swept by the analogue system – although by no means fairly erasing it. The ministry that after employed 1,200 folks now operates because the General Secretariat of Commerce, with barely 300 workers.
The pictures successfully operate as each private diary and collective archaeology – a report of a working tradition that has largely evaporated, whilst its buildings persist. “At the time, I didn’t realize the value,” Patsouras says. “Years later, I understood: It wasn’t just my story. It was a historical document.”
From archive to e-book
The rediscovery got here slowly. In 2022, he confirmed the collection on the Photometria International Photography Festival in Ioannina, then on the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023, the place curator Hercules Papaioannou of the MOMus Thessaloniki Museum of Photography acknowledged its significance and later wrote the accompanying essay for the publication. Exhibitions in Larissa and Athens adopted, culminating within the Hyper Hypo photobook – a richly printed, practically hundred-page hardcover wherein the pictures communicate for themselves, leaving solely a faint eager for the backstage particulars captions may need offered.
Today, Patsouras continues to reside and work in Athens as knowledgeable photographer, specializing in long-term, human-centered initiatives. His work has obtained a number of awards and is a part of the everlasting assortment of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography.
The lengthy dormancy of “7 a.m. – 3 p.m.” feels applicable. It wanted time – to age, to seek out its that means in a modified world. Its gradual maturity stands in distinction to the moment proliferation and self-presentation of at present’s picture tradition, when the whole lot is optimized and aestheticized. Patsouras stays unsentimental about each eras. “I’m not one of those who look back on the past with nostalgia,” he says. “It was a beautiful period of my life, full of creative exploration – but I’m not longing for it.”
Many of the folks he photographed are gone; others, now gray-haired pensioners, appeared on the photobook launch a latest Wednesday night at Hyper Hypo’s headquarters in central Athens. Their presence lent the night a wierd intimacy. It additionally confirmed that Patsouras’ digital camera, quiet and affected person, was by no means thought to be an intruder. It entered the stomach of the beast to not expose it, however to hearken to its heartbeat.
7 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Photographs by Michalis Patsouras
Publisher: Hyper Hypo
Pages: 96
Material: Hardcover with obi band
Price: €42.00