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MAJOR KYTHERIAN EXHIBITION ANNOUNCED
20 March 2006

In less than two years time, Kythera will have the privilege of collaborating with one of the most important and popular Greek cultural institutions, the Benaki Museum in Athens. The Museum’s director, Angelos Delivorias, has confirmed that the first major exhibition of work by the historic Kytherian photographer Panayotis Fatseas (1888-1938) is to be held at the Benaki Museum during January and February 2008; it will be co-produced with the Kythera Cultural Association and curated by association’s artistic director, John Stathatos. This represents a particularly significant and weighty recognition, since the museum is the leading authority on the history of Greek photography, and very few Greek photographers have been given the honour of one-person shows there. The Fatseas exhibition will include contemporary digital prints produced from original negatives, original vintage prints and the photographer’s work book with its careful annotations of every single image he ever made, as well as other exhibits relating to the life and work of a Kytherian who, as we are beginning to realise, was a very considerable artist.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensively illustrated monograph, for which the Cultural Association is currently seeking a publisher and sponsors; it is not yet known whether this will be a bilingual Greek/English edition, or whether it will prove possible to publish a separate English-language edition. What is certain is that every effort will be made to tour the exhibition to other venues, particularly abroad, and suitable institutions are to be approached to that effect.

AUSTRALIAN SPONSORSHIP FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE
20 February 2006

Work has begun in earnest on the Fatseas Archive, the single largest and most important component of the Kythera Photographic Archive. Consisting of over 2,200 glass negative plates exposed by Panayotis Fatseas between in Leivadi between 1920 and 1938, many in poor to very poor condition, the archive was donated to the Kythera Cultural Association by the photographer’s heirs in 2002. It proved to be an artistic as well as a historical treasure trove, and plans are afoot for a major exhibition of Fatseas’ work in the next two to three years; in the meanwhile, however, considerable work is necessary in order to conserve and catalogue the archive.

The necessary steps are:
-Stabilisation of the glass plates and storage in favourable conditions in order to avoid further deterioration; this stage has already been completed.
-Cleaning and curating – currently ongoing.
-Cataloguing, including correlation with the photographer’s work book and, if possible, identification of the subjects, followed by the assigning of a catalogue number.
-Digitising the negative; this results in three digital files of different sizes from which future positive prints will be made, thus reducing deterioration of the originals to a minimum.
-Storage under archival conditions.

All this is not only extremely time consuming, but the necessary museum-quality materials and equipment have represented an expense which the Cultural Association has up to the present been hard-pressed to meet. Now, thanks to the generous assistance of Angelo and John Notaras of Sydney, Australia, the Photographic Archive has been provided with the tools essential for this important task. To date, the following items have been acquired:

A Microtek ScanMaker i800 professional flatbed scanner with a maximum resolution of 9600x4800 dpi, capable of handling negatives up to 10’x8’ in size.
An Epson Photo R1800 A3+ printer, which will be used in conjunction with archival inks from MIS in the United States to produce positive prints for exhibitions, etc.
A large metal plan chest for the storage of positive prints, photos and documents.
A supply of archival four-fold envelopes in acid-free paper for the individual protection of cleaned and curated glass negatives; these were produced to measure by a specialist firm in Athens.

Research is still going on to find a suitable source of archival boxes for the storage of the negatives; these will probably have to be made to measure and imported from France.

Further good news in this context is that we are making arrangements for a young Kytherian currently studying photography at the Athens Technical Institute to fulfil her work experience degree requirement by assisting the Cultural Association’s artistic director, John Stathatos, in the preservation of the archive. This will speed up the entire process dramatically, as she will be working full-time for a period of several months. More information about this as soon as arrangements are confirmed.

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