-Finalist at the New York Times Lens Blog Photo Review, April 2013
-Second place in the Dealer's Choice, Santa Fe Center, Juror: Dianne Vanderlip, Curator, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA & Curator Emeritus, Denver Art Museum, Fall of 2011
-New York Times January 2nd 2009 Featured in the NY / Region : "Answers About New York At Night" William Chapman Sharp author of “New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950,” ,
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/answers-about-new-york-at-night-part-2
-American Roads, Dallas Morning News. https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-dallas-morning-news/20070418/282862251441866
-Nightlight, Kouros Gallery, New York
Iannis Delatolas is a photographer who works in New York City. Born in Germany of
Greek immigrant workers, his early childhood was spent in the industrial sector of
Düsseldorf. His night-time photographs, made only with available natural light,
without special effects, are filled with nostalgia and reverie; they demand time to be seen fully,
their details
yielding to a concentrated, continuing gaze. In a sense, because Delatolas makes
photographic images that trade on a subdued grief, he can also be seen as participating in a
particularly American kind of elegy: his images of a gas station in Brookings, Oregon, or a
drive-in movie theater, or a dirt road in Vieques, Puerto Rico, have the grief-ridden melancholy
of a Hopper painting, contemplating as they do waste sites or banal places that leave the viewer bereft of
comfort. In his dreamlike scenarios, Delatolas visits the empty isolation of
America’s postindustrial landscape, hoping for a glimpse of hope in what is both a romantic
darkness and a metaphor for losing one’s way.
This is not to say that Delatolas is an artist who completely refuses solace; something is
gained by the very perception of the photographs themselves, which yield their pictorial
information through the course of time. The ethics of looking hard, of internalizing parts and
bits of images and reading them as complete components of a shadowy composition,
demands more than the casual glance of a jaded viewer. By taking his photographs in
darkened light, Delatolas is already constructing an allegory of the vision with which we see
the world; our view of things remains at least partially dependent on the mood we carry
within us. The elegiac is in some ways central to the American esthetic (think, again, of the
mood in Hopper’s canvases)—although it is not always clear what it is we should be mourning.
My own hunch is that, in the face of America’s global capitalism at the start of the twenty-first
century, we are grieving for a more or less complete loss of innocence. Delatolas’s images are
seen through a glass darkly, and he offers little optimism except for the small pieces of light
that illuminate his views of destitution and decay.
Photography itself may be the most expressive way to capture loss in art; its very nature, in
which a fleeting moment is recorded seemingly objectively but actually resonant with
subjectivity, enables the artist to address issues of yearning and sadness that inevitably
accompany the present’s relationship to the past. It appears that we are always distressed
about something; photography specifies the image but not the emotion following it, leaving
our imagination to embrace the concomitant existence of two kinds of time: the recorded
moment and the present recognition of that exposure to what-has-already-happened. If it is
true that we are always attracted to the myth of a golden age, it is also right that we are
always unable to touch that moment when the past has been redeemed by a vision, in the
present, of a future that holds the promise of a brave new world. Delatolas’s images are a
critique of the last gasps of the industrial landscape, depicting a kind of funerary performance
of values that can no longer work their magic on the world. Indeed, the very triviality of the
moments documented by the artist is a subtle subversion of the grand gesture late in a time
of savage imperialism; it is not that the images are modest or self-effacing—in fact, they
quietly will a vision whose application is cogent for an end-game scenario. Perhaps Delatolas
is saying that he records the end of the world as we know it, suggesting a millennial view
capable of effacing the darkness we have already brought into it.
In the silver gelatin print, Brookings OR (2003), Delatolas responds to a highly anonymous
scene of a man leaning against a car in a gas station. Although it is night, the brilliant artificial
lights illuminating the scene appear as white zones accompanied by darkness. Behind the car,
on the right side of the image, is a brilliantly lit sign advertising Chevron gas, the phrase,
“Food Mart,” lit up underneath it. The glowing whiteness of the signs stands out beautifully in
the nighttime surrounding them, for a brilliant contrast of tonalities. Only the gas station itself,
moderately lit on the left side of the image, and the late-model car on the right, are seen in a
language of tonal neutrality. One thinks of the bland anonymity of Ed Ruscha’s photos of gas
stations in California, but you can see a more lyrical search for expressiveness in Delatolas’s
work, as if the image before you was opening up the sequence of a dream. The image’s
narrative import may be freely interpreted; that’s the attraction of many of the images, which
propose the content of an entire short story within the confines of a single picture. The
sadness of Brookings OR results from our identification with the ambience we see—we’ve all
gotten gas for the car late at night, perhaps far away from home.
Isolation is palpable in much of Delatolas’s art.
St. Mary’s Drive-in (2002), a silver gelatin print 40 inches square, barely reveals a broad movie screen in the outdoors; a Ryderesque moon rides high above it. Here, the vision of the piece
seems mysterious to the point of being mystical; the audience envisions the eerie presence of
something apparently abandoned to the darker, deeper forces of nature. One picks out a bit of
cloud cover just above the screen, while the natural light of the moon leaves a zigzag of
illumination just beneath it. Nothing seems connected, but the overall feeling is enigmatic
rather than tragic. A tree can be seen on the right side of the photograph; it is a shadow, a perfect silhouette, of
itself. The screen’s broad rectangular form is clearly, in its regularity, amanmade artifact, while the romance of
the moon and foliage underscores the persistence of the natural even in places where you least expect it. The
contrast between the human and the (scarcely) visible world is intuitively rendered, with a deep feeling for
things that cannot be explained.
What is one to make of these images, blinded as they are by the lack of light? Actually, things
are more complex than they seem, for the images do in fact cohere as visual statements. The
presence of darkness is treated as a given, resulting in compositions that are energized by
their lack of easy readability. Yet the titles give out information; there is even a political
statement inherent in the name of Vieques Backroad (2004), which refers to the Puerto Rican
island of Vieques, the site of an American military bombing range, which was only closed and
vacated because of public outcry and the mobilization of activists. In the photograph, a back
road, not much more than a worn path, slightly curves as its moves to meet the darkness in
the background. There is leafy foliage on the left and a telephone pole, outlined in what
seems to be moonlight, on the right; no person disturbs the picture, whose ethics are
understood from the name of the image alone. The notion of a path or journey ending in
darkness is rich with metaphorical possibilities; in this case, Delatolas lets his title politicize his
environmental view. As happens with the two photographs mentioned above, the darkness
serves a momentous purpose, the light revealing only just enough of the image for us to make
our way.
Jonathan Goodman
Sections
-Finalist at the New York Times Lens Blog Photo Review, April 2013
-Second place in the Dealer's Choice, Santa Fe Center, Juror: Dianne Vanderlip, Curator, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA & Curator Emeritus, Denver Art Museum, Fall of 2011
-New York Times January 2nd 2009 Featured in the NY / Region : "Answers About New York At Night" William Chapman Sharp author of “New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950,” ,
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/answers-about-new-york-at-night-part-2
-American Roads, Dallas Morning News. https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-dallas-morning-news/20070418/282862251441866
-Nightlight, Kouros Gallery, New York
Iannis Delatolas is a photographer who works in New York City. Born in Germany of
Greek immigrant workers, his early childhood was spent in the industrial sector of
Düsseldorf. His night-time photographs, made only with available natural light,
without special effects, are filled with nostalgia and reverie; they demand time to be seen fully,
their details
yielding to a concentrated, continuing gaze. In a sense, because Delatolas makes
photographic images that trade on a subdued grief, he can also be seen as participating in a
particularly American kind of elegy: his images of a gas station in Brookings, Oregon, or a
drive-in movie theater, or a dirt road in Vieques, Puerto Rico, have the grief-ridden melancholy
of a Hopper painting, contemplating as they do waste sites or banal places that leave the viewer bereft of
comfort. In his dreamlike scenarios, Delatolas visits the empty isolation of
America’s postindustrial landscape, hoping for a glimpse of hope in what is both a romantic
darkness and a metaphor for losing one’s way.
This is not to say that Delatolas is an artist who completely refuses solace; something is
gained by the very perception of the photographs themselves, which yield their pictorial
information through the course of time. The ethics of looking hard, of internalizing parts and
bits of images and reading them as complete components of a shadowy composition,
demands more than the casual glance of a jaded viewer. By taking his photographs in
darkened light, Delatolas is already constructing an allegory of the vision with which we see
the world; our view of things remains at least partially dependent on the mood we carry
within us. The elegiac is in some ways central to the American esthetic (think, again, of the
mood in Hopper’s canvases)—although it is not always clear what it is we should be mourning.
My own hunch is that, in the face of America’s global capitalism at the start of the twenty-first
century, we are grieving for a more or less complete loss of innocence. Delatolas’s images are
seen through a glass darkly, and he offers little optimism except for the small pieces of light
that illuminate his views of destitution and decay.
Photography itself may be the most expressive way to capture loss in art; its very nature, in
which a fleeting moment is recorded seemingly objectively but actually resonant with
subjectivity, enables the artist to address issues of yearning and sadness that inevitably
accompany the present’s relationship to the past. It appears that we are always distressed
about something; photography specifies the image but not the emotion following it, leaving
our imagination to embrace the concomitant existence of two kinds of time: the recorded
moment and the present recognition of that exposure to what-has-already-happened. If it is
true that we are always attracted to the myth of a golden age, it is also right that we are
always unable to touch that moment when the past has been redeemed by a vision, in the
present, of a future that holds the promise of a brave new world. Delatolas’s images are a
critique of the last gasps of the industrial landscape, depicting a kind of funerary performance
of values that can no longer work their magic on the world. Indeed, the very triviality of the
moments documented by the artist is a subtle subversion of the grand gesture late in a time
of savage imperialism; it is not that the images are modest or self-effacing—in fact, they
quietly will a vision whose application is cogent for an end-game scenario. Perhaps Delatolas
is saying that he records the end of the world as we know it, suggesting a millennial view
capable of effacing the darkness we have already brought into it.
In the silver gelatin print, Brookings OR (2003), Delatolas responds to a highly anonymous
scene of a man leaning against a car in a gas station. Although it is night, the brilliant artificial
lights illuminating the scene appear as white zones accompanied by darkness. Behind the car,
on the right side of the image, is a brilliantly lit sign advertising Chevron gas, the phrase,
“Food Mart,” lit up underneath it. The glowing whiteness of the signs stands out beautifully in
the nighttime surrounding them, for a brilliant contrast of tonalities. Only the gas station itself,
moderately lit on the left side of the image, and the late-model car on the right, are seen in a
language of tonal neutrality. One thinks of the bland anonymity of Ed Ruscha’s photos of gas
stations in California, but you can see a more lyrical search for expressiveness in Delatolas’s
work, as if the image before you was opening up the sequence of a dream. The image’s
narrative import may be freely interpreted; that’s the attraction of many of the images, which
propose the content of an entire short story within the confines of a single picture. The
sadness of Brookings OR results from our identification with the ambience we see—we’ve all
gotten gas for the car late at night, perhaps far away from home.
Isolation is palpable in much of Delatolas’s art.
St. Mary’s Drive-in (2002), a silver gelatin print 40 inches square, barely reveals a broad movie screen in the outdoors; a Ryderesque moon rides high above it. Here, the vision of the piece
seems mysterious to the point of being mystical; the audience envisions the eerie presence of
something apparently abandoned to the darker, deeper forces of nature. One picks out a bit of
cloud cover just above the screen, while the natural light of the moon leaves a zigzag of
illumination just beneath it. Nothing seems connected, but the overall feeling is enigmatic
rather than tragic. A tree can be seen on the right side of the photograph; it is a shadow, a perfect silhouette, of
itself. The screen’s broad rectangular form is clearly, in its regularity, amanmade artifact, while the romance of
the moon and foliage underscores the persistence of the natural even in places where you least expect it. The
contrast between the human and the (scarcely) visible world is intuitively rendered, with a deep feeling for
things that cannot be explained.
What is one to make of these images, blinded as they are by the lack of light? Actually, things
are more complex than they seem, for the images do in fact cohere as visual statements. The
presence of darkness is treated as a given, resulting in compositions that are energized by
their lack of easy readability. Yet the titles give out information; there is even a political
statement inherent in the name of Vieques Backroad (2004), which refers to the Puerto Rican
island of Vieques, the site of an American military bombing range, which was only closed and
vacated because of public outcry and the mobilization of activists. In the photograph, a back
road, not much more than a worn path, slightly curves as its moves to meet the darkness in
the background. There is leafy foliage on the left and a telephone pole, outlined in what
seems to be moonlight, on the right; no person disturbs the picture, whose ethics are
understood from the name of the image alone. The notion of a path or journey ending in
darkness is rich with metaphorical possibilities; in this case, Delatolas lets his title politicize his
environmental view. As happens with the two photographs mentioned above, the darkness
serves a momentous purpose, the light revealing only just enough of the image for us to make
our way.
Jonathan Goodman
Sections