Greek Photography At Xposure 2026 Explores Migration And Humanity In Athens

Stories of migration, identity and shared humanity shaped the opening day of Xposure 2026, as three Greek photographers presented powerful documentary projects from Athens and Greece’s border regions, speaking during a panel held under Athens’ role as Guest of Honour at the tenth Xposure International Photography Festival.

The discussion, titled "Stories of Migration, Culture, and Humanity," brought together photographers Antonios Pasvantis, Christina Kalligianni, Dimitris Tosidis and Maro Kouri. Moderators Dr. Yannis Kontos and Dr. Ioannis Galanopoulos Papavasileiou guided the session, which explored long-term visual work on migration, religion, poverty and cultural memory within contemporary Greek society.

For the 2026 edition, Xposure International Photography Festival introduced a Guest of Honour format for the first time, with Athens leading the programme through five curated exhibitions and a series of talks that examined heritage, social change and visual storytelling, positioning the Greek capital at the centre of this year’s thematic focus.

During the panel, the photographers presented award-winning bodies of work that highlighted very different Greek landscapes. Pasvantis focused on Greece’s northern border region of Evros, Tosidis shared a long-term study of the Vlachs, while Kouri showed projects on everyday multicultural life in Athens, a city of more than three million residents.

Tosidis spoke about spending two years with the Vlachs, a traditionally nomadic pastoralist community in Greece, mainly based in mountainous areas and known for a long history as skilled shepherds. "I wasn’t photographing nostalgia – I was witnessing a way of life at its very edge."

Explaining the depth of this engagement, Tosidis described how he followed five Vlach families across seasons and landscapes to understand their routines. "Through them, I saw a Greece that exists far from postcards: shepherds reading the weather in the clouds, families moving on foot as they always have and rituals carried out for the last time. When a woman lights a candle on her mountain after her husband’s death, you realise you’re not just documenting people, but the fading of an entire cultural memory," he said.

This long-term commitment, Tosidis added, aimed to record what he described as the ‘purity’ of a story rarely recognised outside specialist circles. The project, presented at Xposure International Photography Festival, traced how traditional movement, religious practices and seasonal labour intersected with modern pressures that now place this way of life at risk.

Kouri turned the audience’s attention to Athens itself, where Kouri grew up among diverse migrant communities. Kouri described how the Greek capital’s streets became both workplace and personal archive. Kouri’s photographs dealt with quiet encounters of faith, routine and displacement, reflecting how multicultural identities have reshaped everyday life across dense neighbourhoods and central squares.

Guiding viewers through this work, Kouri shared images of Muslim immigrants from South Asia praying on Fridays at Omonia Square, one of central Athens’ busiest areas. Other photographs showed Ethiopians, described as among the city’s oldest migrant populations, gathered in community spaces, along with scenes from a makeshift gospel church used by African immigrants for worship and support.

Kouri also displayed photographs from inside Catholic, Sikh and Islamic spaces in Athens, depicting personal acts of devotion against a backdrop of migration debates. Another image showed a mufti praying in Greece’s northern border region of Evros after the burial of unidentified migrants, a scene that highlighted the human consequences often hidden behind abstract border statistics and policy discussions.

Reflecting on long relationships with these communities, Kouri told the audience: "Athens is my home, but I have always felt close to Asia and Africa - thanks to communities from there who I grew up with," Kouri said. "I feel at home with these communities," she remarked, adding, "years ago, a young girl in Ethiopia who had sold her kidney to support her family welcomed me into her home with generosity and warmth. Moments like that stay with you – they shape how you see people, and why you photograph them."

Stories of Migration, Culture, and Humanity at Greece’s borders

While Kouri focused on urban life, Pasvantis centred a presentation on Evros, Greece’s northernmost regional unit. Evros borders Turkey to the east, across the river Evros, and Bulgaria to the north and northwest. The region functions as a key gateway into Europe, and has become a focal point in discussions on migration, security and national memory.

Pasvantis explained that this project began as a deeply personal journey. "Twenty years ago, when I crossed into Turkey by train, I felt something strange and powerful at the border," said Pasvantis, describing how that first crossing two decades earlier later grew into a sustained photographic investigation of one of Europe’s most historically charged landscapes.

That early experience continued to draw Pasvantis back. "That feeling stayed with me. Between 2016–17, when I decided to create a black-and-white book, the idea of borders kept pulling me back to Evros. It’s a place that carries deep historical and cultural weight and one that is constantly present in public consciousness."

Showing a series of black-and-white photographs at Xposure International Photography Festival, Pasvantis outlined the overlapping stories visible in Evros. "In Evros, you see the effects of poverty after the Greek economic crisis, the reality of migration as the region becomes a gateway into Europe, and at the same time a quiet, peaceful coexistence between Greek Christians and Greek Muslims. All of these layers live side by side, shaping the stories I try to observe rather than explain."

Together, the presentations by Pasvantis, Tosidis, Kalligianni and Kouri demonstrated how Greek photographers are documenting social change, from remote mountains to Athens’ busy squares and contested border rivers. Their contributions to "Stories of Migration, Culture, and Humanity" at Xposure 2026 highlighted how images can record faith, hardship and coexistence at a moment when questions of migration, identity and heritage remain central across Greece and beyond.

With inputs from WAM