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| Eirini Vourloumis |
As a child in Greece, the photographer Eirini Vourloumis was very close to her grandfather, Andreas Vourloumis, a figurative painter who was part of the group of significant Greek artists known collectively as the Thirties Generation. Vourloumis, now thirty-five, said that her grandfather helped to raise her and showed her “how to look at things” as an artist. “He was curious about the small things in life, how people moved on the street, how a cement apartment building could be beautiful, how his mother played cards,” Vourloumis told me.
In homage to her grandfather, Vourloumis began a visual dialogue with his watercolor paintings and his drawings of Athenian streets, which he walked nearly every day on the way to his studio. Called “In the Same Space,” after a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, the project was featured on the New Yorker photo department’s Instagram feed earlier this month. Vourloumis, who works as a photojournalist, and has focussed on the negative consequences of the Greek economic crisis, said that she has enjoyed engaging with her grandfather’s more positive approach to the texture and depth of Greek life. “His art was an extension of his love for his country, the light of Greece, the people,” Vourloumis said. “He celebrated daily life in Athens through his art.”
