Friday, November 27, 2015
The Greek island of Kythera takes central stage at the Half King Photo Series in New York, from November 17 to January 3, 2016, through the photos of Kristina Williamson, who lived and worked among Kytherians for over a year, aiming to see how emigration, modernization, and globalization were affecting the island's tiny community.
Her images were published in a volume in 2013, a visual contemplation of the contradictions of modernity, of ‘what endures from the past and what is gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were'. The book won third place for Best Documentary Photography Book at the International Photography Awards (2015).
One Year on Kythera is a ‘visual document of what stitches together Kythera’s communities—traditions that prevail, despite a foreboding future, its inhabitants and its culture’. It is a contemporary look into the lives of those who have chosen to remain on the island; the ways in which they maintain a traditional way of life and those in which their lifestyles are changing. Williamson’s photographs unveil Kythera as a complex, beautiful place, ‘defined by its relationship to the sea and its rocky green hills, where young and old enact with humor the rituals that define community’.
