Shades of Love by Dimitris Yeros

Shades of Love by Dimitris Yeros

Shades of Love by Dimitris Yeros

Michael Cacoyannis Foundation presents
for the first time in Greece
the Exhibition entitled
Shades of Love

with Photographs by Dimitris Yeros, inspired by the poems of C. P. Cavafy

Dimitris Yeros, who is widely famous in Greece for his paintings, has been working, in parallel, during the last few years, having the same passion, on photography. His photographs have been exhibited in many exhibitions abroad, mainly in the U.S.A, they have been published in books and they are part of great museum collections.

Now, for the first time, Greek audience will have the opportunity to be introduced to his photographic work, in an exhibition entitled Shades of Love that is going to be hosted from December 1st to 30th at Michael Cacoyannis Foundation.

A selection of 35 black & white large-scale photographs is going to be presented in the exhibition, among 70 photographs in total, with which Dimitris Yeros has “illustrated” in his uniquely individual way poems of C. P. Cavafy.

In a lot of the exhibition’s photographs we will have the chance to admire some of the most important personalities in the fields of Arts like the Nobel awarded Gabriel Garcia Marques and Naguib Mahfouz, the multi-translated author in Greece Gore Vidal, the writer and academic professor Michel Tournier, the most important alive Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, the awarded American authors Edmund White and Richard Howard, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the famous visual artists Jeff Koons, Arman, and Tom Wesselmann, the Director Clive Barker, the actor Olympia Doukakis, and many others, who all have been asked to pose for Dimitris Yeros since they all have a special relationship with C. P. Cavafy’s poetry.

On some of the photographs, videos are going to be projected with the portrayed person reading the poem that has posed for, creating this way the illusion that suddenly the photographs become alive.

Edward Albee, Gore Vidal and Edmund White, aware and fans of Cavafy’s poetry are some of those who have been shot reading with unique sensitivity the poem.

At the official opening of the exhibition, on Wednesday December 1st 2010, at 20:00, Michael Cacoyannis will address a speech.


Unique to Yeros’s vision is that his creative process is often like a poet’s. Certainly, no contemporary photographer is more “poetic”.

John Wood, from the Introduction of the book:

All the portraits are included in the new book of photographs by Dimitris Yeros, entitled Shades of Love, which is out in Greece this November and in the rest of the world in January 2011, published by Insight Editions, California. The book includes foreword by Eduard Albee and introduction by John Wood and contains 67 photographs taken by Dimitris Yeros to illustrate an equal number of poems by C. P. Cavafy.

The book will be available at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation Shop during the exhibition as well as at the greek bookstores.

“There are only two great painters who have also been great photographers–Man Ray and Dimitris Yeros, two artists who actually have much in common. Yeros, just as Man Ray did, approaches his twin arts from radically different positions so that his paintings look nothing like his photographs. Both artists developed an aesthetic of photography distinct and separate from their aesthetic of painting. In photography Yeros is an acknowledged master of the nude, as was Man Ray, and his photographs, like Man Ray’s, are primarily driven by beauty. They immediately appeal to the senses and to the emotions. Yet his paintings, again like Man Ray’s, are surreal and reach far beyond reality, beyond the world of senses and the flesh. Though their appeal is as immediate as the appeal of his photographs, it is an appeal to the intellect as it tries to understand and make sense of what he is showing us. And finally the paintings do make very good sense and become quite clear. But initially Yeros’s paintings also turn sensual in their appeal because the mind does not worry with making ‘sense’ of them and realizes that much of their ‘sense’ lies buried in their rich sensuality –in their juxtapositions of startling imagery and manipulations of color as shimmering and delicate as Mark Rothko’s.”

John Wood (source www.yeros.com)