George Tatakis

Early Exposure and First Encounters with Photography

My relationship with photography began long before it became a profession. Growing up in Athens, I was surrounded by images almost unconsciously. My mother carried a camera with her at all times—an unusual habit in the 1980s. At the same time, a neighbour in my grandfather’s bicycle shop (Tsiliggiris) in Kallithea ran a small photo lab, where film was developed, and videotapes were rented. The mechanics of photography and the anticipation of seeing an image emerge made a lasting impression.

From an early age, I was drawn to artistic expression. I studied piano, drew and painted, and later explored other creative fields. At sixteen, I bought my first camera with my own savings. Photography entered my life not as a decision, but as a gradual accumulation of curiosity.

Engineering, Travel, and the Delayed Turn Toward Art

Believing that art alone was not a viable professional path, I studied Electrical Engineering in Edinburgh, completing both my undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree. I later began doctoral research in Greece, which I eventually left in order to enter the job market.

For nearly a decade, I worked as an engineer, including a senior business development role in an international technology company specializing in managing large-scale solar energy systems. Extensive travel during this period intensified my engagement with photography. Each trip reinforced the idea that photography was not simply documentation, but a way of thinking.

The decisive moment came when I left engineering entirely. Photography ceased to be parallel to my life and became its central axis.

First Exhibition and the Missolonghi Turning Point (2015)

My first solo exhibition, INDIA, took place in Missolonghi in 2015 during a local photography festival. While there, I encountered the Ai Simios (St Simeon) festival—a ritual deeply embedded in local history, community, and collective memory.

Photographing this event marked a turning point. For the first time, I realized that Greek rituals and customs were not simply visual subjects. They were living systems, requiring time, repetition, and sustained presence. This realization laid the conceptual foundation for what would later become Ethos.

The Birth of Ethos: Customs, Character, and Identity

Ethos began as a long-term photographic exploration of traditional events, rituals, and communal expressions across Greece. The name Ethos emerged later, during the curatorial process of the first major exhibition. It reflected both the ethical character of the work and its subject matter—ήθη και έθιμα, the customs that shape collective identity.

The early years of Ethos were marked by significant practical difficulties. Having left my engineering career, financial resources were limited. Travel was done primarily by car, often avoiding toll roads. I frequently slept in the car, outdoors on beaches, or in the homes of local people who offered hospitality. These constraints were not aesthetic choices but practical realities.

Paradoxically, these conditions enabled deeper access. Remaining longer in each place, returning repeatedly, and participating in everyday life fostered trust. Many images from Ethos exist precisely because the photographer was no longer perceived as an outsider.

Publications, International Recognition, and Leica

As Ethos developed, the work began to circulate internationally. It was published in major outlets including National Geographic, LFI (Leica Fotografie International), and other international and Greek publications. Several images were featured by Leica in their Master Shots and Photo of the Week selections.

These publications did not alter the direction of the work but confirmed its relevance within a broader photographic and cultural context.

Reflex Photographers and Cultural Platforms

During this period, I co-founded the cooperative Reflex Photographers. My primary role within the collective was business development and strategic partnerships. I was responsible for initiating collaborations, managing institutional relationships, and shaping the outward-facing strategy of the group.

One of the major initiatives of this period was pculiar.com, a cultural platform documenting customs and traditions in Greece and beyond. While the platform itself was technically developed by Antonis Chrysakis, I was involved in its strategic direction, partnerships, and content development.

Through Reflex and pculiar, collaborations were established with organizations such as Canon, Leica Fotografie International, Huawei, and Blue Star Ferries. The collaboration between pculiar and Blue Star Ferries later received a Silver Award at the Greek Tourism Awards.

Ethos at the Benaki Museum and International Exhibitions

In 2018, Ethos – Another Side of Greece was presented at the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture in Athens, under the auspices of the Greek Ministries of Culture and Tourism. The exhibition was the result of sustained curatorial effort, extensive follow-ups, and long-term strategic work.

Following Athens, Ethos traveled internationally. In 2019, it was presented at the Fragonard Museum in Grasse, France. During discussions with the museum, curatorial interest shifted toward women’s traditional dress—an interaction that directly influenced the direction of my next project.

From Ethos to Caryatis: Two Catalysts, One Shift

Caryatis did not emerge abruptly, nor was it a stylistic experiment. It was the result of two distinct but converging experiences that fundamentally altered my relationship with photographic method.

The first catalyst was institutional. When Ethos was invited to be presented at the Fragonard Museum in Grasse, France, curatorial discussions naturally shifted toward the role of women within traditional culture. Grasse—historically associated with perfume, femininity, and crafted identity—prompted a focus on women’s traditional dress as carriers of collective memory. This curatorial dialogue planted the first concrete seed for a new body of work.

The second catalyst was conceptual—and more disruptive. In the same period, one of my photographs was selected to represent Greece at the exhibition “Another Europe”, held at King’s Cross in London. The exhibition was organised by the Austrian Cultural Forum in London in collaboration with the European Commission and featured one photograph per EU member state. Greece was represented by my work.

During my stay in London for the exhibition, hosted in part through the Austrian Embassy, I visited The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho. There, I encountered an exhibition by Alex Prager. At that point in my career, I had largely demonised staged photography. My work was rooted in lived experience, repetition, and unmanipulated situations. Walking through Prager’s exhibition, I initially assumed the images were extraordinary snapshots—complex scenes captured through impeccable timing. I was deeply impressed by their visual density and narrative ambiguity.

At the end of the exhibition, a behind-the-scenes video revealed that the images were fully staged, constructed through elaborate sets, actors, and cinematic direction. That moment was decisive. It forced a reassessment of a belief I had held almost dogmatically: that authenticity in photography was inseparable from spontaneity. I realised that what ultimately matters is not how an image is produced, but what it communicates—and whether it holds visual, emotional, and conceptual truth.

The Fragonard curatorial direction and the Alex Prager exhibition functioned together as the two necessary conditions for Caryatis. One provided the subject. The other dissolved a methodological prohibition I had imposed on myself. Caryatis was born at that intersection: a project that maintained ethnographic responsibility and cultural fidelity, while allowing for fully staged, directed photographic construction—always in service of meaning, never spectacle.

Awards, Exhibitions, and How Caryatis Was Rolled Out Publicly

Between 2021 and 2025, Caryatis received 24 international photographic awards. The project, however, was never designed as a “small set” of images. Its full form is a 200+ work exhibition, and that reality created a practical problem from the start: printing and framing the complete body of work at once would be prohibitively expensive.

To solve this, I designed a phased public rollout: a sequence of smaller exhibitions that would introduce Caryatis across Greece while gradually building toward the final unified presentation in Athens. This is why the exhibitions were named as chapters—Caryatis Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so on. Each chapter functions as a public entry point into the larger work, while making the production financially and logistically sustainable.

Caryatis Alpha opened in Kalamata in August 2023 at the “V. Karelias Collection of Traditional Greek Costumes”, in collaboration with the Lyceum Club of Greek Women Kalamata. Caryatis Beta followed at Symposion Cultural Center, Santorini, in September 2023. After Alpha and Beta, a strategic partnership began with the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation to continue the chapter exhibitions and build an institutional road toward the concluding Athens exhibition.

Caryatis Gamma – Thrace opened at the Silk Museum in Soufli in July 2025, continuing the project’s sequence of regional chapters.

In parallel, Caryatis entered Athens International Airport, where exhibitions cannot be hosted directly by private artists. Both airport exhibitions were presented by the Lyceum Club of Greek Women Kalamata under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture. Caryatis Aether opened in July 2024, followed by Caryatis Aether Part 2 in July 2025.

Alongside the Greek chapters, Caryatis circulated internationally through award-driven touring exhibitions. An image photographed in Spetses was selected as the main visual for the Sony World Photography Awards Winners’ Exhibition, which opened at Somerset House in London in April 2022 and then travelled internationally.

UNESCO and Cultural Preservation

In 2019, selected photographic and ethnographic material from my archive was included in the official dossier for Karpathiko Glendi. The material contributed to its inscription in Greece’s National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage under the Ministry of Culture and Sports, within the framework of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

This marked a shift from documentation toward cultural preservation.

Independence and Continuity After Reflex

Following the conclusion of Reflex Photographers, all institutional collaborations, academic relationships, and partnerships remained with me personally. The work continued independently, maintaining its research-driven and institutional orientation.

Fonissa: When Photography Entered the Film Itself

My first meaningful contact with cinema did not come through directing, nor through conventional behind-the-scenes work. It came through photography—embedded inside a film as part of its narrative structure.

During the production of Fonissa, I was invited to collaborate as a Conceptual Photography Consultant. My role was not to document the film set, but to create photographic images that would exist within the film itself. These photographs functioned as narrative objects: props that carried psychological and symbolic weight, influencing the flow and atmosphere of the story.

Alongside these in-film photographs, I developed a parallel photographic narration—a sequence of images constructed in my own visual language, responding to the film’s themes rather than illustrating its scenes. This required a shift in thinking: from the autonomy of the single image to the responsibility of images operating in sequence, rhythm, and emotional continuity.

For the first time, I was directly exposed to the internal mechanics of film production: how visual intention is negotiated, how atmosphere is built collaboratively, and how meaning emerges from the interaction of image, sound, time, and performance.

What mattered to me was not the novelty of participating in a film, but the realisation that many of the questions I had been exploring through photography—staging, authorship, narrative tension, and time—were already cinematic in nature. Fonissa did not pull me away from photography. It revealed that photography could operate inside cinema without losing its autonomy.

Extending the Frame: From Still Images to Time

Following Fonissa, it became clear that if I wanted to explore these questions further, I needed a space that allowed for sustained experimentation—outside institutional constraints, commissions, or predefined formats. This is how my YouTube channel emerged.

Not as a content platform, and not as a departure from photography, but as a controlled environment: a place to test how a photographic way of seeing behaves when extended across time. The channel functions as a laboratory where I can explore cinematography, narrative structure, rhythm, and editing—using real projects rather than abstractions.

Photography remains the foundation. Composition, geometry, restraint, and intention still govern the work. The difference is duration. Instead of a single decisive moment, the image is now allowed to unfold, to breathe, to accumulate meaning.

The channel also reflects a broader shift in authorship. Rather than waiting for permission, commissions, or institutional frameworks, it allows me to develop ideas independently, refine a cinematic language, and engage directly with an audience that values process as much as result.

This is not a reinvention. It is a continuation. My work remains rooted in Greek culture, identity, and tradition—not as nostalgia, but as living material. Whether through still images or moving ones, the objective remains the same: to create work that resists imitation, rewards slow viewing, and carries a clear authorial voice.

Photography taught me how to see. Cinema is teaching me how to let that vision unfold in time.

Who is George Tatakis?

George Tatakis is a Greek fine-art photographer focusing on culture, tradition, and identity in contemporary Greece through long-term black-and-white photographic projects.

What are George Tatakis’ main photographic projects?

His two main bodies of work are Ethos, documenting Greek rituals and traditions, and Caryatis, a staged portrait series exploring regional female attire and cultural identity across Greece.

Why does George Tatakis prefer long-term projects over single images?

George Tatakis views photography as a narrative art form. Long-term projects allow for deeper research, cultural immersion, and visual consistency, unlike isolated, one-off images.

Where has George Tatakis’ work been exhibited?

His work has been exhibited in museums and institutions in Greece and internationally, including museum exhibitions and curated photography festivals.

Has George Tatakis’ work been published internationally?

Yes. His photographs have been published by international media and institutions, including major editorial and cultural platforms.

Is George Tatakis associated with National Geographic?

George Tatakis has collaborated with National Geographic on selected projects and assignments, contributing photographic work aligned with documentary and cultural storytelling.

What influences George Tatakis’ photographic style?

His work is influenced by classic documentary photography, European visual culture, and photographers such as Josef Koudelka, Costa Manos and Henri Cartier-Bresson, combined with a strong emphasis on composition and geometry.

Why does George Tatakis work exclusively in black and white?

For George Tatakis, black and white removes the distraction of color, allowing form, gesture, light, and human presence to take priority. It reinforces the timeless nature of the traditions he photographs.

Is George Tatakis’ work documentary or staged?

His work moves between documentary observation and carefully directed portraiture, depending on the project. This dual approach allows both authenticity and intentional visual storytelling.

Where is George Tatakis based?

George Tatakis is based in Kolonaki, Athens, Greece, while working on projects throughout Greece and abroad.