Nico Perkyra
STREAM 7997
Photographs linger at the edges of memory, sometimes forgotten, sometimes waiting for the right moment to be seen again or recalled. Stream 7997, represents an act of retrieval, establishing a dialogue with time, past and present, between the instinctive gaze of a young photographer and the critical distance of someone returning to the medium decades later.
This project originated from an archive in limbo: over 3,000 negatives shot between 1979 and 1997, almost forgotten and quiescent for 30 to 40 years, stored in drawers, some poorly preserved, others barely remembered, and some completely forgotten. Upon revisiting them, it became clear that beyond serving as personal memory, these images could be shaped into a cohesive selection. Through collaboration with his son, many of the selected images were digitally restored, though traces of time were intentionally preserved, embracing the natural imperfections of age rather than erasing them.
The selection process became crucial. If editing in the past was instinctive, now it functions like remastering an old vinyl record—recovering details, refining structure, and allowing the images to form a coherent narrative or a line of though, thinking with images, that neither denies its past nor succumbs to nostalgia. During this process, some photographs underwent digital manipulations, not as an act of revisionism but as part of a broader effort to align them with the series overall vision.
In revisiting these negatives, something fundamental emerged: what continues to attract the photographer to the medium today was already present in those early frames. While intuitively documenting daily life, family, friends, and surroundings, the work followed a set of self-imposed principles, almost dogmatic in nature. Avoiding what, for now and for lack of a better term, I’ll call a pavlovian, uncritical, and anachronic neorealist tone, which was common at the time and is still present in the work of some photographers, was part of a broader effort to resist a mode of representation that, although rooted in a powerful social and political art movement, risks becoming an aestheticized cliché of passive empathy. When perpetuated decades later, especially in photography, it tends to reduce poverty and marginalization to objects of detached, voyeuristic compassion.
Still, Stream 7997 resists becoming an overly sentimental family album. While people remain central, they are not simply portraits but part of a broader visual rhythm, embedded within shifting contexts that reveal as much about atmosphere and place as they do about individual presence. Some moments carry a fictionalized undertone, ensuring the sequence follows a multi-layered flow rather than remaining purely autobiographical.
There is also a question of continuity. The choice of a geographically ambiguous pseudonym, Nico Perkyra, allows future projects, some of which began almost simultaneously with this one, to unfold in entirely different settings, further emphasizing the open-ended nature of Stream 7997 and its foundational role.
It imagines the trajectory of a photographer who published a book in the 1980s or 1990s, then stepped away, immersed in a technical profession, collecting photobooks and images in the meantime, only to return with a more deliberate, informed approach. What happens when someone picks up photography again after decades of living and observing? How does the act of looking change when experience reshapes intuition?
Like the work of photographers who operate at the intersection of the personal and the documentary, Stream 7997 invites viewers to consider how images accumulate meaning over time. It is about recognition but also recontextualization, about how something captured in an instant can take decades to fully reveal itself. Through these series, we are not just revisiting a past moment but witnessing a photographer's evolving relationship with time, memory, and the photographic act itself.
And ultimately, it is a test of whether images captured in another time can still hold weight and meaning in the present. One can only hope that a significant portion of these images has aged well, resisting the test of time as best as possible and remaining relevant today.
SIDE WINDOW
Can you get to know a city by driving along its roads? Of course not, but you can glimpse something. A shape, a blur, a line of trees. A light changing color. These fragments may never be the city itself, yet they begin to form the basis of an impression. Side Window is made from such fragments: photographs taken from a moving car as dusk falls over Los Angeles.
The perspective from inside a moving car through a city, Los Angeles in this case, is far from unprecedented. In cities built around the logic of the automobile, it’s almost inevitable that artists and photographers have been drawn to this viewpoint. Some have used the car interior as a frame to observe other vehicles, narrowing the gaze inwards. Others have looked outward, letting the city slide past like a film reel. This work belongs to that lineage, but with a quieter tone. It is unassuming and minimal, more of a sketch than a finished declaration. The modest size of the book reinforces this sense of intimacy, an object not meant to overwhelm, but to suggest.
Here, the act of looking is shaped by motion, distance, and a kind of passive observation. The city is not approached directly, but from a shifting, glancing perspective, one that reflects a detached way of seeing, almost indifferent, but still curious. This sense of detachment is not coldness; it’s the condition of looking through glass, at speed, without the time to linger.
What connects the images is not narrative but rhythm: the repeated appearance of horizontal bands of asphalt, scrubby grass, road barriers. These elements, often blurred by speed or fading light, create a kind of visual continuum, a flow that evokes not only movement but a specific sensory state, somewhere between stillness and velocity. Occasionally, vertical interruptions, lampposts, palm trees, the edges of anonymous homes, slow this rhythm, offering moments of calm within the stream.
There are almost no people. Is this because of the time of day? The route chosen? Or does the gaze itself avoid them? Most likely, it's a mixture of causes and intentions. The time of day the photographs were taken, the locations, residential neighborhoods, freeways, transient spaces within the city, all contribute to this absence. The photographer’s preference for images that are not overcrowded also plays a role here, taken to an extreme in this sequence, as a deliberate aesthetic decision. It’s less about dogma than about sensibility: a visual intuition that figures, human or animal, can sometimes destabilize the image, shifting its balance or weight. Still, their absence does not negate their presence. Contrary to what Allan Sekula, a photographer, critic and marxist once called the “neutron bomb aesthetic,” referring to the work of Lewis Baltz, the lack of people in the frame does not erase the perception of their influence or intervention in what is shown. In Side Window, the result is a city rendered as surface rather than story, a place that feels deserted but never truly empty. What emerges is less a document than an impression, less a survey than a mood. A way of seeing that is transitory, indirect, and gently estranged.
BER Hbf
Berlin Hauptbahnhof (BER Hbf) is more than a transport hub where people come and go. A station at the center of Europe, made of steel and glass, where trains depart in every direction. These routes, for me, trace a path back through the past, especially the twentieth century.
Most photographs in this series are made in Berlin, but they are not about the city in a literal way. They show almost no touristic places or monuments. Instead, the city appears through textures, gaps, and silences. History is not explained, but it is always present: in buildings, in empty lots, and in the way the grey light falls. On train and subway journeys, echoes appear, of passenger portraits or window views.
Some of these empty spaces, abandoned lots, pieces of ground left over, have been part of Berlin’s imagined landscape for decades, from "Himmel über Berlin" to the images of Michael Schmidt, “the best photographer of Kreuzberg,” as he ironically called himself. They are becoming rarer, but they still exist. They feel like places that ask questions. Places of pauses in the rhythm of the city. For me, they allow space to think, to remember. Memory becomes physical here: open, unshaped, and also a kind of warning. Like the small brass stones on the pavement with the names of people who were persecuted and killed by the Nazi Regime. A nocturnal martial standard silhouetted in traffic signs at Potsdamer Platz. The past isn’t just remembered under our feet, it’s now also in front of us.
Weimar Republic echoes in the background. Artists, musicians, and writers remembered sometimes by a song, perhaps a hymn of what started with utopic generosity and ended in desolation and oppressive terror.
From Berlin, a train heading south, through forests, seeded plains, and quiet stations, bound to Terezín, once Theresienstadt. A place that was both a ghetto and a propaganda tool. It returns again and again in books, music, and photography. Not far from Berlin, the Wannsee Villa still stands, with an innocent calm on the surface. Its windows and garden do not reveal the past, just like the opaque windows of a registry office I first saw in books and photographs, and later visited after a train journey.
Photographs, like buildings, are often disconnected from their meaning. Sometimes we take snapshots, apparently ignoring their weight. Without context, they remain silent. The surface may seem neutral or even beautiful, while what is significant remains hidden. That gap, between what we see and what we know, is something this series tries not to close, but to leave open.
I regret that I was in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1980s and didn’t go to Berlin. The images here were made recently, but they try to connect with that time. I couldn’t resist revisiting a few of them, treating them to imagine the photographs I might have made if I had gone back then. The Berlin I missed but kept imagining.
These photographs do not aim to tell history. They look at its traces. The city is not explained, but it is seen and felt. Berlin appears here as both subject and background: unfinished, layered, and much alive.