Images of an Enchanted Land: Greece 1954-1965

Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, currently on show at the Hellenic Centre in London (until 16 February), is a rare chance to catch a glimpse of two worlds now vanished for good: Greece pre-mass tourism, and photography pre-mass digitisation.

The collection on show are the work of Chicago-born photographer Robert McCabe whose first photographs of Europe were the result of a trip in 1954 to France, Italy, and Greece while he was an undergraduate at Princeton University. He returned to Greece in 1955 via freighter from the U.S., traveling extensively in the Aegean with a Rolleiflex and Plus-X film, and again in 1957 when he took a series of color photographs in the Greek Islands at the request of the National Geographic Society.

'I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that daily life in the islands has changed more in the last 40 years than it did in the previous 4,000 years,' he says of his images. 'When I first visited the Aegean, in 1954, there were, essentially, no motor vehicles, no running water, no electricity and no telephones....[And] Photography today is very different than it was in 1954, with billions of new images being created every day by ubiquitous digital cameras. Maybe Brassai had the answer 40 years ago when he wrote that it was the force of an image that mattered; that there were many photos that were full of life, but which were confusing and difficult to remember. I would add to that the importance of poetry in a photograph. For me a successful photograph can create the same emotion in our soul as a poem.'

Follow the link to The Independent for an article by the photographer about his journeys