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 a neo-realist drift, steering clear of overtly dramatic or demagogic tones, while infusing the work with a melancholic weight and a detached presence in relation to the photographed subjects.
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.