Dick Blau Photography
Ethnography of the Emotions in Family and Field
-
Skyros Carnival
SKYROS CARNIVAL features sixty color and black and white photographs by Dick Blau, an ethnographic essay by Agapi Amanatidis and Panayotis Panopoulos, and a CD and DVD by Steven Feld. In the book’s opening pages, each of the collaborators describes their role and entry point into the project.
Dick:
I grew up in the theater, my father a director and my mother an actress. As a result, I developed a lifelong fascination with the dramatic moment, the heightened gesture, the mysterious transformation of self into other. I suppose it was inevitable that my abiding preoccupation with the stage would find its way into my photography. When Steve called one day a few years ago and told me that Panos had told him about Greece’s wildest and noisiest carnival, I put down the phone and began packing my bag and cameras...
What I eventually discovered on Skyros was not exactly what I spent the next few months imagining. I had been dreaming of Dionysius, Pan, and the Eleusinian mysteries in a smoky grove, but I found myself instead in a small Greek island town with an Internet café. Normal life continued amidst the wildness. Performers and audience were mixed together. And then there were the cameras. Everyone, it seemed, was either taking pictures or posing for them. This was not simply an ancient ritual; it was a modern media event.
In fact, the carnival was old and new at the same time. Skyros Carnival is a hybrid form in which the goat dancers, dressed in their rough, rank animal skins and festooned in huge clanking bells, mix easily with other performers who look decidedly of our moment. It hardly mattered I would be standing at dusk on the street waiting for the dancers to appear when a kid would float by wearing a cheap monkey mask from the grocery store, and I would instantly find myself swept up with him into the world of myth. This was what I had come for. It is the story my pictures try to tell.
