Michalis Poulas

Poulas was born in Athens, Greece in 1978. His father, a professional sailor, opened a one-hour process film shop back in 1988 in Crete island as he tried to stay close to his family – that was Poulas’ first contact with photography. He studied photography at Leica Academy in Athens and worked in the fashion industry for some time. In 2003 he established and has since been running his own photo lab in Sitia, Crete, where he currently resides. He makes pictures as a means to ease the fear of death.

Infinite Perimeter*
These pictures were taken on the island of Crete between May 2014 and 2019. This series of photographs is not a formal documentary so much as it is a depiction of a place defined by explicit morphological characteristics – the land remains conceptually and geographically boundless.

Infinite Perimeter is a project about human identity as it exists within the current stage of capitalism. It is about the feelings of loss, loneliness and isolation that everyone can experience whether as actual immigrants or even into their homeland. It is about the sense of being exiled even from ourselves.

If Crete is both protagonist and silent bystander in the series, the deuteragonist
is the Swedish mathematician Niels Fabian Helge von Koch. He discovered the eponymous
Koch snowflake, one of the first examples of a fractal – a curve of infinite length outside a bounded area.This pretty form appears to be simple, but in fact it fractures to produce an endless void.The futility which underpins this complex concept resonated with me, I recognized in it the key tenets of our modern condition, and drew on the accompanying text for the series title.

Imagine you have a shape and the perimeter is growing and growing infinitely, but the space
inside it stays the same. It’s like a fence that’s keeping people outside of an imaginary shape. This idea is thrown into stark relief by the refugee crisis so familiar to residents of the Greek islands, with Koch’s snowflake contextually reflecting the European border.

To view more of Michalis Poulas’s work please visit his website.