







About
Peter Lyssiotis
I like my analogue camera because it gave me the entry into the world of Art, photography & photomontage.
I like the fact that I was born in 1949-it’s always good to avoid a golden age.
I like writing- & if I had to choose my 3 favourite writers they would be Albert Camus, Nikos Kazanzakis, Gabriel Marquez & Ernest Hemingway.
I like the Orthodox monastery of Saint Giorgios at Mavrouvouni & its elder, in Cyprus.
I loved my mother.
I liked it when I failed at studying Law after 2 years because that lead me to Literature.
I like poetry- & if I had to choose my 3 favourite poets they would be Yiannis Ritsos, Edmund Jabes, Walt Whitman & Ezra Pound…I never knew the cost of entering a poem until I read them.
I like it that I can read, write & speak in 1/1/2 languages.
I learnt to like prints & works on paper when I was caught in England in the late 60’s – & still do.
I like Rock Music – especially Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison & Scott Walker because they made things bearable when they were not very.
I like making books because the codex is the ideal arena for the interplay of text & image & because it’s the place where ideas do their best to take shape.
I like gardening (on Sundays).
I like coffee.
I still like the 3 short films I made (there was a time I thought I’d like to be a film maker).
I loved my father.
I like the fact that I was born in Cyprus because it gives me an escape into a Europeaness – when I need it.
I like working slowly.
I like cooking & at my best I can do a passable imitation of what my mother cooked.
I’m learning to love jazz-especially the work of Miles Davis & John Coltrane because they stood firm & ignored the direction of the grain.
I like it that my Christian name went through 3 changes before it settled on Peter-Bunny, Panagiotis, & Benny.
I like artists who commit-people who breathe & weave the everyday air & don’t fear doing it: Mikis Theodorakis, Mahmoud Darwish, Kath Kollowitz, William Blake, John Heartfield, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Picasso…
I like the ocean, but can’t swim.
I like writing and receiving letters.
I like cinema & if I had to pick my 3 favourite directors they’d be Akira Kurosawa, Theo Angelopoulos, Orson Welles & Sam Peckingpah.
I like collaborating because working with another person encourages me to dare.
I liked teaching for 24 years in 3 state secondary schools.
I like having 2 homelands… & they are the 2 questions no answer can extinguish.
No I do not feel that good when I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a masterthief, I’d rob them.
Bob Dylan, Positively 4th Street.
I write and I make images… these images may be traditional photographs-shot with my analogue Minolta 101, which an uncle bought for me 45 years ago when he went to Hong Kong-or they may be re- assembled from the bits and pieces I cut & archive from popular magazines, brochures, ads or books or they may be the result of the erasures, mark making & obscuring that I might call on. Henri Cartier-Bresson was the thief-someone who worked with both economy and grace- a person who slipped by without being noticed. I apprenticed myself to him when I was younger, until I decided to seduce the camera away from what it was meant to do and used it instead to record the images I assembled through collage & photomontage – so my camera saw only what I wanted to see… it was straight-forward, cut, paste, click, then print. That was then…
Use photography as a weapon.
John Heartfield.
Some of the images I make take special heed to John Heartfield’s directive…they crash against the walls & monuments which The Power celebrates and uses as a means of control – these images are propoganda – always on the side of the angels… they engage with the world which breathes an everyday air-getting tangled with The Big Questions: equality, class, race,the multi-nationals, conflict, organised religion, the environment… the ideas these montages embody face the likelihood of almost instant defeat – but they persist, struggle, spit and lash out-irrespective – sure they may be accused of being cliches and that’s okay (remember cliches have been known to dissolve formal boundaries). In the dream world we do not fly because we have wings; we believe we are wings because we have flown: wings are the consequence.
Gaston Bachlelard: The Poetics of Reverie.
A slight movement of one part of an image can result in the disturbance of what is everyday… this is Max Ernst’s zone; things happen as they might in your sleep or just as you’re about to enter or exit from dreaming… in making such images, the trick is to know when to stop-a thing which I’m still working on.(naturally if a camera is to record such images it must know it is working against itself.)
Working at either Heartfield Strassse or Ernest Boulerard, montage can make the unlikely real; in the blink of an eye. Montage exists in the uncanny; it occurs in a place where photorealism bumps up against metaphor. Because we learn from each other, Hitchcock gave me the idea of story-boarding. I also write a page or two about the work I’m making before I finish it – explaining me to myself.
Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence… someone might possibly have escape from their singing, but from their silence, certainly never.
Franz Kafka – The Parables
The question that lead me to consider erasures was: how much of an image do we really need to see before we get it? I began by erasing the parts of the image which I thought meant nothing-that came easy- but it didn’t seem enough…so I began to hide the parts of the image which were extraneous to the idea I was chasing by using paint china-graph pencils & pastels & that was fine to go but still not enough… So I began scratching into the image-a kind of visual static… which was probably a consequence of watching Chaplin and Keaton in their early films-with the inevitable scratch marks in the opening reels & sitting through short experimental films: there was also the “popping” on L’P’s… all which left the same static on my memory.
Outside of a dog a book is a man’s best friend.That’s because inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx.
As there are the paths leading to Heartfield Strasse & Ernst Boulevard there are also the crossroads… and we know the crossroads are a dangerous place: it’s where a black kid does the deal and walks away with the key-and the skill to take the Blues to their peak; it’s a place where a hot-headed young man might kill his father and go on to marry his mother…this is the place where the artists’/illustrated book has put down its roots-it exists somewhere between Art & Literature. The danger is that such an art is regarded as mixed-race or as hybrid; and as such, it shares the same fate as any other hybrid: it can sometimes be ignored,
sometimes misunderstood and sometimes have even its name misspelt. I want to imagine the books I make move between prose and poetry, between still photography & film, between humanist propaganda & High Art… I want to imagine that both text & image find their most fulfilling moments in such books… I’m certain that a seduction is played out on the page… especially when there’s an understanding that one doesn’t try to tie down the other: that happens when the image unravels into thought and wanders into words and the text transforms into ideas, then becomes an image… a reflection… these books can become what Andre Malraux called… a museum without walls. I trust myself to be part of this tradition & each book I make is like planting a tree-a gesture towards the future. I make these books not only as part of that European tradition, but also as a thank you letter to William Blake and Teriade (Stratis Eleftheriades).
Blake because he set the bar impossibly high with the books he wrote and illustrated & that he &his wife, Catherine printed & bound; and Teriade because he was a great publisher, who knew how to arrange working “marriages between writers and artists & had the imagination to publish The Decisive Moment thereby inventing the photobook.