Kostis Argyriadis – To Love, Fear and Consume. A City Manual

Review by Gerhard Clausing •

This photobook, To Love, Fear and Consume by Kostis Argyriadis, presents a host of challenges to the viewer. First and foremost, what do the three verbs in the title suggest? Our lives are certainly full of challenges, and in our present time we feel particularly vulnerable and are anticipating many unexpected changes. So Argyriadis presents us with many glimpses, characterizing our fast-moving and unpredictable existence with many impressive ambiguous photographs, with an orientation that displays the distinct urban flair of the street.

A departures board (first image shown below) can represent freedom. Its list of cities suggests that another kind of existence may be only a flight away. The same board can also represent control. Every journey has been reduced to a time, a number, a gate, and a status. This ability to support opposing interpretations is central to Kostis Argyriadis’ project. The photographs do not tell us exactly what has happened, but instead place us in situations where desire, anxiety, movement, and commerce become difficult to separate. The title identifies three basic forces: Love draws us toward people, places, and images. Fear makes us seek safety and control. Consumption promises that needs and anxieties can be satisfied through objects and experiences. Argyriadis does not illustrate these ideas separately. He allows them to enter the same photographs. A romantic gesture may also suggest confinement. A safety instruction may make us feel less safe. An artwork may become a product, to be used and/or discarded, while a product may become a strange kind of portrait.

The cover introduces this tension through a frontal photograph of an apartment building. Its balconies, windows, doors, and railings form a repeated grid. Individual lives must be taking place behind the façade, but they remain hidden. The bright title stretches across the gray structure like an advertisement or public command. The building offers shelter while also resembling a storage system for human beings. Before the book is opened, private experience has already been placed inside a larger social structure.

Movement begins with that airport departures board. It contains numerous destinations, yet no travelers are shown. Human wishes and plans have been translated into rows of information. This is one way in which Argyriadis differs from most earlier street photography. Classic street photographers often looked for an expressive human gesture or an unexpected meeting between strangers. Their pictures depended on the brief instant when action and visual form came together. Argyriadis often removes that visible action. He photographs the systems that organize it.

Next I have chosen a photograph of a city seen through rain-covered glass. Buildings and construction cranes remain visible, but the surface between the camera and the city becomes equally important. The moisture turns the view into a veil. We have apparently reached the city, but we cannot fully enter it. Throughout this project windows, mirrors, plastic sheets, printed images, and other barriers repeatedly interfere with direct vision. These obstructions are not defects but part of the book’s argument.

A particularly effective spread places an urban railway scene opposite a hand raised against an airplane window. On the left, tracks and buildings describe the public machinery of travel. On the right, a single gesture introduces private emotion. The hand might be waving, reaching, testing the window, or simply resting there. It could express greeting or farewell. Its meaning remains uncertain because the person’s face and situation are absent. The window is both an opening and a wall. It permits sight while preventing touch. This contradiction offers a useful way to understand the book. Contemporary life provides extraordinary visual access to other places and people, yet that access is often mediated by glass, screens, transportation systems, advertisements, and photographs. We see more while remaining separated from what we see.

Another striking pairing places a hotel evacuation plan beside a woman photographed through a cloudy or wet surface. The diagram promises order. It turns rooms, corridors, stairways, and possible danger into readable symbols. The woman, by comparison, cannot be read so easily. She appears to face the camera, but the intervening surface makes her expression uncertain. The map tells us exactly how to escape the building. The portrait does not tell us how to understand the person. The combination quietly connects fear with temporary intimacy. A hotel room offers privacy, but only for a limited period. It has been occupied by strangers before and will be occupied by strangers again. The emergency plan reminds each guest to learn the route out almost as soon as the room is entered. Safety and danger become neighbors on the same wall.

The wrapped kiosk or carousel presents another uncertain condition. Transparent plastic protects the structure, but it also makes the structure appear trapped or suffocated. We cannot determine whether it is closed for the night, stored for the season, abandoned, or waiting to reopen. The circular form has a theatrical quality, as though pleasure itself has temporarily been covered. It is an image of consumption suspended.

Human identity becomes more prominent in other photographs, although it never becomes more stable. A woman approaches her reflection in a dark surface. Her two faces nearly meet. She may be kissing the reflection, examining herself, confronting another version of herself, or searching for passage through the glass. The photograph can suggest self-love, loneliness, narcissism, divided identity, or curiosity. Any particular one of these interpretations does not exclude the others. This ambiguity requires more work from the viewer than a photograph with a clear event. Argyriadis gives us enough visual information to begin a story but not enough to finish it. The absence of certainty is therefore not an empty space, but rather a place where the viewer’s own memories and expectations enter the book.

The pairing of an empty decorative frame with a handbag bearing a reproduction of the Mona Lisa is especially humorous and pointed. The frame on the wall contains only patterned wallpaper. It identifies a place where an image should be, but the image has disappeared. Across the gutter, one of the most famous paintings in Western culture has moved onto a consumer object. The Mona Lisa now carries a large heart and travels through a retail environment. This spread suggests a transfer of cultural value. The traditional frame has lost its artwork, while the handbag has acquired one. The painting’s historical importance is not destroyed, but it is converted into decoration, affection, fashion, and merchandise. The book does not need to tell us whether this transformation is democratic, absurd, affectionate, or degrading. The pairing holds all these possibilities at once. Love appears more directly in the photograph of a wall covered with names, hearts, dates, promises, and overlapping marks. These inscriptions may record sincere relationships, temporary attractions, acts of vandalism, or attempts to preserve a moment. Private emotion has entered public space. Each declaration asks to be noticed, yet the accumulation makes individual messages difficult to distinguish. The wall becomes a collective photograph without people. Its marks preserve human presence after the writers have left. Some of the relationships recorded there may also have ended. Photography adds another layer of preservation: the camera records inscriptions that were themselves intended to preserve feeling. Love becomes both lasting and temporary.

The spread containing a cosplay contact-lens advertisement and a woman in a black dress develops the themes of vision and constructed identity. The advertisement presents numerous eyes that can be selected and purchased. Looking has become a product. The consumer can choose not only how to see but how to appear while seeing. Beside the advertisement, the woman’s clothing and body are clearly visible, but motion has blurred her face. The commercial eyes are more stable and readable than the actual person. This reversal is disturbing and fascinating. The manufactured identities offered by the poster appear precise, while lived identity remains in motion. The woman may be performing, posing, turning, or resisting the camera. The blur might indicate energy, pleasure, refusal, or erasure. Because the photograph does not settle the question, she remains more than an illustration of fashion or consumer culture. Her uncertainty gives her power.

The final photograph I chose to excerpt shows a large shopping center transformed through tonal reversal. Escalators cross the space in several directions, carrying small, pale figures between levels of retail activity. The architecture resembles a machine designed to circulate bodies. A sign announces that the center is open every Sunday, suggesting that consumer time now extends through the entire week. Rendered in negative tones, however, the mall becomes ghostly. Shoppers resemble traces of people rather than solid bodies. Familiar architecture looks unfamiliar, perhaps even archaeological. The center could be newly built, abandoned, crowded, empty, prosperous, or post-apocalyptic. The photograph turns a space devoted to brightness and attraction into an uncertain interior landscape.

This final image below also further clarifies how To Love, Fear and Consume departs from many traditional street-photography books. Argyriadis’ street is not limited to sidewalks and public squares. It includes airplanes, hotels, stations, shops, mirrors, advertisements, and shopping centers. These are the contemporary locations in which people encounter strangers, perform identities, receive instructions, and negotiate desire. The photographs are also less concerned with identifying a particular city than with constructing a psychological city from several places. Black-and-white reproduction helps connect locations that may be geographically distant. Airports, hotels, railway systems, commercial images, and retail interiors begin to seem like parts of one continuous urban environment. The traveler may cross national borders without escaping the same structures.

The page design supports this approach. Some photographs fill the page, while others are surrounded by generous white space. Several spreads use pairings rather than explanatory captions. The viewer is asked to consider visual relationships: architecture and gesture, emergency information and bodily vulnerability, empty frame and commercial reproduction, manufactured eyes and an obscured face. The sequence creates meaning by association rather than by presenting a fixed narrative. That method makes ambiguity essential. The photographs do not merely contain mysterious details. Their uncertainty prevents the book from becoming a simple complaint about urban life or consumer culture. The mall may be oppressive, but it is also visually magnificent. The handbag may trivialize the Mona Lisa, but it may also express genuine pleasure. The graffiti may be careless, but it may preserve sincere attachment. Travel may isolate people, but it also allows discovery. The several illuminating essays contained in the book also aid in that discovery. There are also many other photo graphs for you to explore.

Argyriadis does not tell us whether to love, fear, or reject the contemporary city. He shows how frequently we do all three at once. The photographs turn ordinary systems and surfaces into evidence of an unstable emotional condition. We are passengers, residents, spectators, reflected bodies, consumers, and makers of temporary marks. We move through environments designed to guide us, while searching for gestures that still feel personal. To Love, Fear and Consume is a visual essay about what the street and our lives have become. Its strongest images do not resolve experience into a decisive moment, but rather show many indecisive moments that reflect the uncertainty of our lives. They allow experience to remain divided, mediated, and unfinished. In that uncertainty, Argyriadis presents a gripping, convincing approach to portraying our time.

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Gerhard (Gerry) Clausing, PBJ Editorial Consultant, is an author, visual artist, and educator from Southern California who explores perception, transformation, and memory.

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Kostis Argyriadis – To Love, Fear and Consume. A City Manual

Photographer: Kostis Argyriadis (born and lives in Thessaloniki, Greece)

Texts: Antigoni Pasidi, Milena Ill, Kostis Argyriadis

Languages: Greek and English

Design: Kostis Argyriadis and Stratos Kalafatis

Softbound, with illustrated cover and lay-flat open binding; 168 pages; 6.5 x 9.25 inches (16.5 x 23.5 cm); printed and bound in Thessaloniki, Greece, by Skordopoulos and Trikaliaris respectively; ISBN 978-618-00-6129-1

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