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Takis Diamantopoulos

Takis Diamantopoulos is tireless in his pursuit of the human image. His models: authors and artists, show biz personalities and politicians, journalists and business people; individuals he tends to know before they arrive at his studio. The speed and ease with which the photographer works is proverbial. The keynote of his style: the way he focuses on his subject – on the person – and excludes any anecdotal baggage in the process. The way he just loads his camera and stands facing his model without requesting this pose or that, his movements betraying something of the hunter’s deliberation as he closes in on his prey. His goal: to capture a characteristic movement, a look, a detail; any part that defines the sitter’s whole.

Takis Diamantopoulos is a portraitist. His preference for black and white still obvious; he sees it as the primary medium of his art. Colour, for him, is for advertising. He says his chosen medium allows him to accentuate the drama of the image, and its austerity certainly parallels the penetrating quality of his gaze. Given his family’s long involvement with the art of photography and his decision to work exclusively in light and shade, his choice was all but inevitable. And as he’s often said himself, he sees anyone he’s going to photograph in black and white right from the start. The powerful portraits he presents the viewer hark back in many ways the psychological portraits of the old masters.

This album of Photographs published by Kastaniotis Editions accompanies, too, the artist’s show at the Donopoulos International Fine Arts gallery, which features 53 female nudes. The women, all friends of the artist, reveal their bodies, their primary means of expression. Actresses, dancers, choreographers, athletes and models who communicate through and work with their bodies, they have guided the photographer to a different approach to portraiture.

Takis Diamantopoulos approaches them without the slightest inclination to intervene with anything save the truth and strictly controlled perspective and light. The women entrust themselves to Diamantopoulo’s gaze, secure in the knowledge that he will photograph them in such a way that even the worst-intentioned viewer will see nothing but the expressive power of the spectacle and the medium,

Suspended in space, their bodies recall figures on an ancient vase. Their movements – the decisive, dynamic, relaxed, charming positions they adopt – all bear witness to the natural flexibility and beauty of the female form. Vibrant, expressionist, enigmatic, mysterious, erotic, bird – or cat-like, alluring, austere, pure; beautiful women, mistresses of their images who command our admiration and inspire the rivalry of their sex. In an era in which the human body is all too often debased, turned into a commodity, Takis Diamantopoulos offers up an alternative image of women, refocusing us on the significance and magic, the beauty and statuesque-ness of the female form; of the body whose naturality and creativity we all too often forget.