THODORIS TZALAVRAS
Nicosia in Dark and White
Following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 most of the buildings in Nicosia in the area around the so-called Green Line were abandoned. A lot of them stayed that way. Over the years I had visited the southern part of the island many times on vacation since my mother’s family is in Limassol. I never spent time in the capital of Nicosia though. That changed in 2002 when during my mandatory service in the Greek armed forces stationed on the island I got to spend significant time in and around the old city of Nicosia. Unlike the locals, who had grown accustomed to this haunting and intriguing scenery, I was unprepared, disturbed and inspired. The places that I present here made such a huge impression on me from the first time I came across them that I felt compelled to communicate this through my craft. All pictures were captured with the existing light entering those places, with a medium format camera on a tripod and long exposures. Thodoris Tzalavras was born in Athens, Greece in 1978. His photographs have been exhibited at Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Silver Eye Center for Photography, HOST gallery, and David Alan Harvey’s loft in New York as part of the Burn Gallery Show. This body of work is published in a monograph HERE