Edgelands attempt to map via photography a landscape that is distinct for its constant reconstitution. This is an area which is placed with ambiguity between the urban and the rural landscape and is endlessly negotiating its boundaries. Photography in this case raises the question: what are the characteristics of a landscape that has not seen and therefore not interpreted pictorially ever? What are the signifiers of a place that escapes its own image? People who are able to recognize such a landscape are only those who have lived it. Being one of them, photographer B. Kougemitros tried to compose it pictorially. His photographs propose a possible version of this “unseen” landscape by assembling non-photogenic elements, disparate and contradictory that only photography can identify as worthy of attention. Natural and artificial walls that are often incorporated into the compositions function as metaphors of that which would be characterized as the edge or the boundary of the city or the countryside. At scattered places of storage, work and sports several intruding fleeting figures engaged in their regular activities indicate that these sites are visitable but not habitable. While the floodlights contribute to what the photographer selectively directs our attention, this series of photographs is equally important not only for what it reveals to the viewer but also for that which the viewer assumes that lurks in the darkness or behind the clusters of trees.

Natassa Markidou