honorable mention
Yiorgos Michael united states
title
burnt
back to gallery
entry description
Wildfires have become the new reality we live in. In the Summer of 2021, wildfires in Cyprus destroyed ancestral land that my mother inherited from her parents. Her late parents planted many of the trees that were burned. These trees stood as the last living memories of them. And here is my mother lost in thought, grieving saliently, surrounded by loss, getting absorbed in the world she knew and now is gone.about the photographer
Yiorgos Michael is self-taught visual artist and poet. In his photographic practice, he explores the impact of norms on human behavior and how these norms manifest visually in the traces that human actions leave on our surroundings. Even if his image-making process is very intentional, he allows the accidental to enter this process to offer an element of surprise and discovery. Following the principle of the intentional-yet-accidental, he developed the photographic essay “A Gray Wall.” He is also working on a poetry collection that explores the linguistic interplay between Greek, his native language, and English and how being bi-lingual leads to emotional disorientation. This literary exploration has led to his latest visual essays, “never a sound of building” and “an echo came,” both based on the poem “Walls” by CP Cavafy.back to gallery