Interview and Portfolio Presentation – Photography Blogger, by Christopher O’Donnell

What better present for my birthday than this?!!
My work has been featured on Photography Blogger in an article signed by a photographer that I admire, Christopher O’Donnell

I’m not much around these days, taking a few days holiday, but I’ll be back soon with interesting news!

Here is the link to the article: http://www.photographyblogger.net/the-greek-cityscape-architectural-photography-by-julia-anna-gospodarou/

(https://web.archive.org/web/20150808090908/http://photographyblogger.net/the-greek-cityscape-architectural-photography-by-julia-anna-gospodarou/)

And here is the full text of the interview:

“I am an architect and a Fine Art photographer living and creating in Athens, Greece and my main body of photographic work consists in black and white images created using the technique of long exposure, but also exploring fields like motion blur or intentional camera movement. I love to photograph everything around me, but I have always had a special affinity for cities and architecture and nowadays this is a clear direction towards which my work is going. Architectural photography was a constant of my whole photographic journey and was ever present on my path, but landscape, especially seascapes, and also street photography are directions often present in my work.

I always felt the need to have a camera in my hand, not so important which kind of camera, because I’m a firm believer in the idea that one can create art with any means, and the camera should only be to a photographer what a brush is to a painter, just a tool and a
projection of his eye and heart. My camera is a part of myself, it’s the part that helps me see the world around me and the camera I was holding in my hand was always one of my most precious possessions.

For me, photography is about introspection and about expressing myself. There is a part of me that could never reach to light in any other way than by means of my photographs. I don’t do photography to show something to the world, I do it to show something to me, to help myself understand the world and explore its beauty. If what I show to myself can also mean something to others, if my aesthetic quests can touch other hearts and minds, that means I managed to get to the essence and translated this essence into a language that can be understood. And then I’m happy.
I’ve always been sensitive to the beauty that surrounds us, so sensitive that I sometimes feel the need to close my eyes to the ugliness around. That means, in photographic terms, that I’m not trying to capture what I see in front of me, instead I’m trying to capture what I feel about what I see. Yes, my photography is a very personal and a very subjective matter. I’m not interested in verdicts, in exhaustive interpretations, but I will always be fascinated by personal statements about the world we live in. And this is what I aim to present in my images. That is why my photographs don’t look like something one would normally see when looking around in real life, but rather like something one would imagine or dream about, not being limited in doing that by the apparent reality. I’m interested in discovering the essence of what I’m photographing, the ideal aspects and characteristics of a subject and present the impact that the things existing under the surface have on me. That’s why, without doing extensive manipulation to my images, my goal is to keep in the frame only what I consider being closer to perfection and ideal. My ideal. The way I present this ideal is by using light. Apparently, an obvious thing, since we are talking about photography, but what my approach is about is that even the light falling on my subject and its surroundings has to be ideal and pure in order to bring to life the perfection existing in my object.

The pursuit of perfection was always an important part of my life and creative work, be it architectural, photographic, or in the study of languages and civilizations, which is another one of my passions. I believe that there is a dose of perfection in everything we see and that perfection always has to do with beauty, the beauty of a shape, of a line, of a shadow falling on a surface, of a streak of clouds crossing a blue sky, of a gesture, of a word, of a hint of light…

My love for architecture and architectural photography and my constant wonder in front of the world surrounding us, next to my desire to share with others the things I know and discover made me decide to extend my activities to teaching workshops and organizing photowalks on architecture and architectural photography as a first step, and on the connection that exists between landscape and the built environment in a particular area as a following direction. I have already organized an architectural photowalk in Berlin this year together with a few photographers friends, and it turned out to be a big success so it will be probably followed by a second one later this year in another European city. As for the moment, I am organizing a workshop/photowalk that will take place in Athens in November and will be built around the idea of finding and capturing the beauty that exists in an architectural object by first understanding how to look at it, then how to look at the light rendering it and finally how to add our self into the equation in order to find our vision and express it into the photograph. From information about the building and the way it was designed, to planning the capture and all the way till the final touches of processing, nothing can be left to chance if we want to penetrate the shell and reach to the soul of a building, in order to show it to the world and express ourselves in the process. Covering this process of creation of an architectural photograph, be it a Fine Art long exposure or a regular one is what I intend to do in my workshop this fall. My long-term intentions are to bring people, either they are experienced photographers or just aspiring ones, closer to architectural photography as a form of art and not only as a way of recording a space, to show to those who are interested that one could look at a building with the same eye he would look at a beautiful scenery and have the same feeling when discovering the beauty.”

Julia Anna Gospodarou - (en)Visionographer

Julia Anna Gospodarou is an internationally acclaimed photographer, architect with a Master degree, author and highly sought-after educator, teaching workshops and lecturing around the world. Founder of (en)Visionography™ and creator of Photography Drawing™, author of the best-selling book From Basics to Fine Art - Black and White Photography , with high distinctions in the most important photography competitions worldwide (International Photography Awards IPA Photographer of the Year, World Photography Awards SWPA and Hasselblad Masters finalist, as well as 80+ more awards), widely published internationally in books and magazines, Julia is passionate about the art in photography and striving to spread it into the world.