A prince of Greece reclaims his land in photos
An Olympus OM-10.
The camera that started it all for Prince Nikolaos. Gifted to him when he was 13, maybe 12, by his parents, King Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie (the last king and queen of Greece respectively). A gadget that ignited a lifelong passion for photography, hesitated a bit when digital became a thing, but has made a comeback, as evidenced by the exhibition of his work that just opened in Toronto.
For the opening last week, held at the Tin and Copper Smith Building on Yonge Street, he gave me both the story and a personal tour.
“All photos are about light,” he said. “And a lot of it is about Greece, because we couldn’t go to Greece for a while” – that whole thing when his father was overthrown in a military coup in 1967; his family was sent away to live in a kind of existential exile – “so when I finally went back I fell in love instantly.”
“Resilience,” the 53-year-old second-born son then uttered in a kind of transatlantic bramble dating back to his birth in Rome, years in London, education at Brown University.
The former royal playboy turned landscape photographer, who comes across as both charming and erudite – you could understand why he made many an eligible bachelor list in the ’90s, was often spied on with women like Elle Macpherson and had been a man’s representative in many cities (such as Gstaad and Saint-Tropez) — went on to say that all the photos here were taken during the lockdown in Athens (where he was finally allowed to move a few years ago with his wife, Princess Tatiana, she of Venezuelan origin and former event planner).
“If Nikolaos’s photographs convey anything, they show reverence for the panoramic beauty of his country – a country that gave him a title but destroyed his heritage,” said British GQ editor Dylan Jones. , it’s not long. ago in a profile of the aristocrat. “The prince is rebuilding his life in Athens, and since he can’t get involved politically, he’s embracing the arts as a way to forge a relationship with his new home.”
I do indeed detect a kind of ambassadorship in his work: a prince who reclaims his country. Albeit in the manner of a deconstructivist. Something that became even more important when he was chosen to represent his country in the Greek pavilion at the 2021 London Design Biennale at Somerset House. This, after his debut solo show, “Phos: A Journey of Light”, held in Melbourne in 2018. He has since exhibited in cities ranging from Copenhagen to Doha. And now… Toronto, in this exhibition organized by Ergo Holdings and its president, Peter Polydor. (After all, this city has long had one of the largest diasporas of Greeks in the world, the eighth largest according to the Hellenes Abroad General Secretariat).
That light, man. The prince must be furious, just like this night, just when the shindig filled up with guests, here for a princely sighting. “That crunchy, crunchy, crunchy light; the light you get against the blue sky and the blue sea,” said Nikolaos. “It’s no coincidence that people have spoken and written about it, painted and photographed it over the course of the millennium.”
So did you nail it? I felt I had to ask. Is there any real science behind that sharpness of light?
“I have a theory,” he hit back. “Especially in the more spring/summer months, sometimes autumn, we have a northerly wind that clears all the clouds. That north wind comes all the way from Russia, so it’s completely dry. No humidity. It’s just incredible.”
Turning to one large-scale photograph of the Acropolis – one that looks like a painting and at the same time something of a digital manipulation – he explained: “I play a lot. But I don’t play with Photoshop. I play with nature itself. It is a photograph of the Acropolis, taken from the reflection of a photo lens in a body of water.”
His process? “I spend a lot of time in the sea. A lot of my work, as you can see, is abstract, but abstract reflections in the sea, whether it’s just blue or black, whether you’re in the middle of nowhere or close to land, like Santorini, which has the high cliffs. I’ve taken pictures that look like an archipelago, but are actually just reflections on the rock. So I said, I want to do this more. I want to discover new colors. I do not change the images. Everything you see is what I see.
“Nowadays,” he added, “everyone has Instagram, you have Photoshop and AI. But what I always say is nature will produce all the colors you want if you are in the right place at the right time and if you have enough patience.”
Just months after his father’s death, King Constantine was mourned in an emotional scene in January and then buried privately at Tatoi, the former summer residence of the Greek royal family just outside Athens, where his parents and ancestors are buried. is a kind of melancholy for many of the photos. Almost all of them, said Nikolaos, represent what Greece stands for when you unpack it: the sea, the vine, the olive tree. “The whole theme is based on water, wine and olive oil,” he mused.
The sea undoubtedly evokes some memories of his father, who, famously, was a member of Greece’s gold-winning sailing team at the 1960 Rome Olympics. The olive tree, in particular, fits the whole idea of resilience, given that “some olive trees can last as long as two and a half thousand years… They have been here long before us and will be here long after we are gone.”
Some early inspiration – to follow one’s interest, to indulge one’s passions – he admitted, came from his paternal grandmother, Queen Mother Frederica. “She lived in Madras before it became Chennai (the capital of Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state),” he remarked, surprising me a bit with this tidbit. After they left Greece, he explained, she moved to India to study Indian philosophy. “If she had a passion for something, she wanted to learn more about it, including nuclear physics! At the age of 60!
“She taught me about the light,” he said, waving to several photos where the light of Greece remains an eternal, never-ending fixation.
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