Edition 2008
John DEMOS
Born in 1944 in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Lives in Greece.
Lives in Greece.
He studied at the University of Chicago where he received a B.A. in Art History and an M.F.A. in Painting in 1968. Returning to Greece in 1969, he taught Photography, Fine Arts and Humanities at the American Academy in Athens. It was during this period in the early 1970’s that Demos started to develop his own body of work. In 1976 he published his first monograph, The Greece that is Passing. After this publication he began his work on the Panigiria-Celebrations series, which was extensively exhibited in Europe during the 1980’s in venues and festivals such as the Rencontres d’Arles, the Primavera Fotografica in Barcelona, the Gulbenkian Modern Art Center in Lisbon and The Photographer’s Gallery in London have had one man shows of his work.Demos has been an active promoter of photography in Greece. In 1979, along with four other photographers, he founded the Photographic Center of Athens. In 1988, together with his wife, Bernardine, he founded Apeiron Photos, to represent Magnum, and other major photo-agencies in Greece. From 1995 to 1999 he created and ran, as Artistic Director, the Photographic Center of Skopelos for the Greek Ministry of Culture. Since then, he has curated some of the most significant exhibits in Greece. The exhibition that is based on the book Shadows of Silence has been shown in Bratislava, Innsbruck, Frankfurt, Houston, Odense, Pingyao, Thessaloniki, Moscow and Buenos Aires.John Demos is represented in major collections such as the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Gulbenkian, as well as in private collections.