Transfiguration.

Photographs by Antigone Kourakou. Texts by Erik Vroons & Costis Antoniadis.

Skeleton Key Press, Oslo, NO, 2022. English, 120 pp., 80 duotone plates, 7¾x11".

Printed in an edition of 300.

By recording thoughts, emotions, and other imprints of her reality, Antigone Kourakou explores the universal dynamic between the natural environment and human presence, and the ability of their interaction to transform us. Her photographs — most often shot in her native Greece — strikingly contrast bright light with deep, velvety shadows. Her collaborative subjects, most frequently women, often appear in contorted, twisted, or dancer-like poses, and alternately, in reflective states of longing, struggle, or lucidity. In Transfiguration, these images are thoughtfully arranged and sequenced throughout with depictions of water, stone, trees, plants, fire and dilapidated interiors quietly assisting the book’s poetic arc. More revealing upon each viewing, Transfiguration poses more questions than it answers, while inviting viewers to participate in a fictional yet tactile world; one open to exploration and interpretation which gracefully reflects on the exuberance and struggle of existence.

"What’s lyrical can be difficult to discuss; the best of it being something that insinuates before our words can fray the experience. Antigone Kourakou’s book is lyrical. To say it's lyrical like drawings or paintings can be lyrical would be reductive. To say that it's lyrical like a poem would be closer, there’s a lot of labor here: editing, directing models, sequencing the images so the momentum keeps going; but still, a poem is different in too many regards. What is seen comes to the heart differently than what is heard.

"Transfigurations is a book of images found in the heart, totally free of the head. It’s a book of connections, dreams, forgotten symbols, Redonesque sources of light and darkness; a book where flesh and stone are kin, where landscape and the individual body are one." — Christopher Johnson, photo-eye Bookstore

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