Georges Salameh was born in Beruit in 1973 and is a Greek-Lebanese visual storyteller. After film studies in Paris, he moved to Athens where he made his first creations. He now lives and works in Palermo. Today we feature is ongoing project, Refuge, Dreamgrove. This project is a photographic series based on the notion of hospitality and sleep.
The series is formed by photographic triptychs divided into three categories:
#1 Men asleep in public places or means of transport.
#2 Internal spaces where I was welcomed to stay.
#3 View from a host’s window, balcony, terrace…
“Your home will be the one where you would put your head to sleep and for a pillow one dreamgrove”.
These words were pronounced by a prostitute, hosting a scared 12 years old kid. He was one of thousands greek survivors from the “Asia Minor Catastroph” of 1922. To reach Lebanon, he walked barefoot from Smyrna in Turkey, for days, before losing the rest of his family on the road and seek refuge for 4 nights in a brothel in the port area of Beirut. For the rest of his life, this sentence and that city became his haven. That kid was my grandfather, the one I never met.
“Wandering between Mediterranean shores, when I have to define myself, I become a storyteller …
My tales are like letters to a friend, songs and essays, gestures and words said, or left unsaid, all floating down-stream to oblivion.”
“I try to respond intuitively to emotionally resonant ideas, touching on reality as it is unravelling – as if my camera were listening. My view is a search for the right distance from faces and landscapes. It provokes the unexpected through suspense.”
To view more of Georges’ work please visit his website.