Final Analysis

Roger Hicks considers… An image from ‘Caesura’, 2016, by Demetris Koilalous

‘Like many of the pictures in the book, this one is deliberately artless. It is a snapshot, right down to the sloping horizon’

Some books demand more of their readers than others. And so, by the same token, do some pictures. At first sight, Caesura: The Duration of a

Sigh (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) is quite dull: pictures of people, detritus and landscapes. But then you realise what it is about. Slowly it becomes immersive; we become one with its subjects. In an afterword, Bill Kouwenhoven quotes the Book of Leviticus: ‘But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you.’

The pictures were taken in Mytilene and are of, or about, refugees more or less freshly arrived in Greece: en route, they hope, from their old lives to new ones. Technically, a ‘caesura’ is a pause or breakpoint within a poem. Here, it is a pause or break-point within people’s lives.

Look closer

Let us go back to how things seem at first sight. What is this a picture of? Rubbish on a tree: plastic bags, probably. But look closer. These are not plastic bags but clothes drying. They may be most of what an individual or even a whole family was able to bring this far in their long trek. Who would undertake such a journey if they were not driven by desperation? Would you?

No doubt there are economic migrants among these refugees. But equally, when you look at the lives portrayed by Koilalous, it is hard to believe that economic migrants make up anything like the percentage claimed by nationalistic politicians and the gutter press. The misery of their lives, the poverty, the uncertainty: all are harrowing.

The underlying message is that these are people like us, but without our advantages. Their countries are torn by war and persecution, as ours in Europe are not; at least for now, though there are plenty alive who remember WWII, and others who fear for the future.

Like many of the pictures in the book, this one is deliberately artless. It is a snapshot, right down to the sloping horizon: it would not win any prizes at a camera club exhibition. But imagine for a moment that it had been exquisitely photographed with a large-format camera on a tripod. We might marvel at the way the photographer had extracted beauty from ugliness. But this is not even ugly. It is simply banal, everyday – which well captures the banality and everydayness of its subjects’ lives. They need food and shelter; they need to wash their few clothes. They need hope. This book, and this picture, helps us to put ourselves in their situation.

Roger Hicks has been writing about photography since 1981 and has published more than three dozen books on the subject, many in partnership with his wife Frances Schultz (visit his website at www.rogerandfrances.eu). Every week in this column Roger deconstructs a classic or contemporary photograph. Next week he considers an image from the US Library of Congress