From ‘Here and Now' to ‘Then and There'

Photographs which I have taken in Greece over the past 45 or so years are currently being donated to the Benaki Museum Photographic Archive in Athens. The majority of these photos relate to research carried out on the Cycladic island of Anafi and among island migrants in Athens. Preparing to make this donation has prompted a consideration of the role of photographs as social and cultural records (see Caplan 2010). Banks and Vokes (2010: 340) refer to Barthes’s discussion of the photograph as establishing ‘a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then’ (Barthes 1977: 44). What was contemporary in the 1960s, and is now in the past, gains a new ‘here and now-ness’ when subjected to the processes described in this paper: processes of re-interrogation and re-interpretation inspired by discussions with islanders and migrants and by reflexive introspection.