MIAMI HERALD Photo collection 'Shades of Love' by Dimitris Yeros features male models, intro by Edward Albee
Greek painter and photographer Dimitris Yeros has published an oversize photo collection inspired by the poems of C.P. Cavafy. The 170-page book features dozens of male models, many nude, including Miami Beach author David Leddick. Insight Editions, $75.
Here's the news release and a few featured photos:
From renowned painter and photographer Dimitris Yeros comes a collection of photographs inspired by the classic poems of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century: Constantine P. Cavafy.
Yeros has produced nearly seventy photographic illustrations using a mixture of models and fellow members of the artistic community such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gore Vidal, Carlos Fuentes, Jean Baudrillard, Duane Michals, Clive Barker, Chuck Close, and Jeff Koons as his subjects.
In the book there are, also, several nude images of handsome, young men.
The book, which was recently released in the US bookstores by “Insight Editions”, California, was introduced by John Wood while the foreword was written by Edward Albee.
You can get a “taste” of the book in this link:http://www.yeros.com/shades.html
In addition, a selection of these images was exhibited last December in Athens by the renowned Michael Cacoyannis foundation.
You can see some aspect of the show here:www.youtube.com/dyerostudio
These striking images bring out every nuance of Cavafy's writing with romance, intrigue, humor, despair, and eroticism each playing a part.
In addition to its visual richness, the book presents new English poetic translations of Cavafy by David Connolly which are faithful to the original Greek works while bringing them to life for a new group of readers.
Recognized as an artist who is always pushing boundaries and thinking of new, innovative ways to transform his photography, Dimitris Yeros saw now as the perfect time to match his photographs to some great poetry—namely, to a specially commissioned translation of some of C P Cavafy’s most powerful poems. Yeros combines the words of Greece’s best known poet with photographs—bringing the two art forms together on the page in a way rarely seen before.
In Shades of Love, Yeros’s aim was to bring out the nuances of Cavafy’s poetry by creating images that replicated his words. To put it modestly, Yeros succeeds in fusing his photography with Cavafy’s poetry, but, as his fans will recognize, he pushes even further. This visionary artist takes these two art forms, blending them in a way that the reader will see what Yeros saw: that they were always meant to be together.
Step into this brave world where poetry and photograph are fused in a boundless, complex collaboration that sets out to explore and blur the lines between light and dark, youth and age, seen and unseen.
Certainly no contemporary photographer is more "poetic" in the larger contexts of the term than Dimitris Yeros is, but he is also poetic in the smallest and most technical contexts, as well. In these photographs he does not focus on the complete poem, Cavafy's full narrative of the event, but on its most shimmering moment. These photographs then are synecdoches, classic poetic and rhetorical figures in which a part is used to suggest the whole. Poets utilize this device constantly, along with metonymy, in which a thing is replaced by something else that suggests it in richer or more complex ways. Yeros's genius is to bring to photography, which is a fresh, young, not even two-centuries-old art, the techniques of the most ancient of arts. And in so doing Yeros has created one of the most lyrical evocations of masculinity within the photographic arts.
John Wood, from the Introduction
