Orthographs
From 2009 until 2016 the greek photographer Yiorgis Yerolymbos has been documenting the construction of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens. Among the thousands of photographs that were taken during that time a small corpus of images stands apart for its singular point of view. That of looking down from a height of approximately 100 meters. From that height, with the photographer hanging out of a crane cradle, three dimensional architectural objects get compressed into their “origin” as two-dimensional “drawings”. The images seem to extend indefinitely without focusing on any privileged object, a continuation of the cubist revolution at the start of the twentieth century and later of the paintings of Jackson Pollock and of the output of the Dusseldorf School.

In the photographs, the form of a human being, a plank of wood, tress lose their familiarity and act like pixels on a large canvas. The detail of the photographs as one delves into them becomes an integral element in their reading. Zooming into an image the detail seems to resist getting enlarged, as would be the case of “blowing up” a photo until all detail gets lost. In this instance, the photos, act more like fractals where one can seemingly zoom in indefinitely with more and more information getting revealed. Taking advantage of this, in certain instances in the book a part of an image is repeated enlarged. At that scale the “identity” of the pixels gets revealed and their materiality restored.

The book was funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and published by Yale University Press.