Textual Contexts of Consumption

In 1980, after a series of successful collections of short stories, Yorgos Ioannou published Omonoia 1980, a relatively slim but highly original volume of prose fiction, in which his text was combined with photographs by Andreas Belias. ¹ The appearance of Ioannou’s book in 1980 suggests that compared to other European countries, where literary collaborations with photographers were definable modernist moments, ² Greek literary publications belatedly discovered modernity in the usage of photographic images. ³ Bringing in photography to a literary book evidently modified the standards of what Greek modernity considered to be appropriate visual props for a literary publication: until 1980 seminal poetry collections, for instance, had been ornamented with etchings or engravings by painters associated with the generation of the 1930s such as Yannis Tsarouchis and Yannis Moralis (Ikaros 1993). The fact that literary collaborations with photographers had no precedent until 1980 may be suggestive of photography’s low status among the visual arts in Greece and of a slowly adapting national literary market that until then was too suspicious towards the visual properties of photography to consider it a worthy companion to the literary text.