Gypsies have long been marginalized in Greek society, often living in poverty; photographer Nikos Economopoulos captures their daily lives
Nikos Economopoulos
"Being on the road, traveling without a predetermined purpose, looking around me with visual curiosity and being surprised by what I encounter. While shooting, somehow, thinking is suspended. It is like playing a game with reality."
- Nikos Economopoulos
Nikos Economopoulos was born in the Peloponnese, Greece, in 1953. He then studied law and worked as a journalist in Parma, Italy. He started photographing in Greece and Turkey and eventually abandoned journalism to dedicate himself to photography.
He joined Magnum Photos in 1990 and his photographs began appearing in newspapers and magazines around the world. In the same period, he started traveling and photographing extensively around the Balkans. This work won him the Mother Jones Award for work in progress. Upon completion of his Balkans project in 1994, Economopoulos became a full member of Magnum Photos. His book, In the Balkans, was published in 1995 in New York and Athens.
In the 1990s, Economopoulos started working on borders and crossings, photographing the inhabitants of the “Green Line” in Cyprus, the irregular migrants on the Greek-Albanian borderline, and the mass migration of ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo. In the mid-1990s, he started photographing the Roma and other minorities. In 2000, he completed a book project on the Aegean islands storytellers, commissioned by the University of the Aegean.
A retrospective of his work, titled Economopoulos, Photographer, was published in 2002 and later exhibited at the Benaki Museum in Athens in 2005. Over the past decade, Economopoulos has turned to the use of color. He is currently spending most of his time away from Greece, traveling, teaching, and photographing around the world.
