May 23, 2013

Anna Wich: with love from Germany

The truth is that I had never heard of Anna Wich before last evening but thanks to my friend Esther I got to know this great photographer's work that was recently exhibited at the Goethe Institute.

Her images are clear and totally honest with intensive lines and forms, illustrating the unseen -to the common eye - magic of Athens daily life.

Anna Wich visited Greece in 1975, a little after the fall of the military junta and before the beginning of the abrupt modernization that followed. It's a short mid-time that Greece tries to balance between the old and the new.

As everyone was leaving the past behind, looking to the future , Anna Wich turned her lens onto this time being focusing on neglected faces, places, spaces that probably no one else cared about.

" Artists should not be after the success" she used say. "Photography has to set reality and people free".

Anna Wich was German. She was born in 1949 and grew up in Frankfurt. She then moved to Paris and finally chose to live in Athens where she worked as a photographer for both magazines and the greek film industry and also as a monteur.

Anna Wich died from cancer in 1998.

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