Polixeni Papapetrou Believes in the Power of Imagination
Delphi, March 2, 2017
As the result of my childhood experience, it was natural to go down the path of exploring issues of identity and otherness in my work. At the start I was photographing homeless people, drag queens, Elvis fans, Marilyn Monroe impersonators and body builders. I was drawn to photographing people who lived on the edge of the conventional mainstream or who deviated from the mainstream archetype. I was interested in ‘otherness’. Despite the diversity in the groups that I photographed what they all had in common was that they were performing their identity, that identity is something that is fluid, malleable and can be constructed. While the representation of identity has been a consistent theme in my work, in the past 15 years I have been exploring portrayals of childhood identity. But more than this I have tried to understand what it means to be human.