Abstract

This interview was commissioned to reflect upon the ideas explored in the artist monograph Here We Are, an anthology of Panos Kokkinias’s photographic work (1994-2007) on existential subject matter. It examined the conceptual and ontological workings behind the shift from straight, instantaneous photography towards the so-called “directorial”, or otherwise constructed practice in the late 1980s and 1990s, the blurring of the boundaries between the private and the public as photographers consciously retreated to esoteric and the domestic rather than the public, the transgression of photographic genres as well as iconographic/iconoclastic traditions, media and disciplines, the challenging of ideas around photography’s unique phenomena and verisimilitude, whether these are physically rooted in its indexicality, or conceptually constructed around the modernist idea of taking rather than making photographs.