Nicosia in Dark and White

• Photographer
  Ioanna Mavrou, Cyprus
• Website
  http://www.tzalavras.com

Following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 most of the buildings in Nicosia in the area around the so-called Green Line were abandoned. A lot of them stayed that way. Thirty+ years later, this project is a glimpse into them. This is not a documentary in the strictest sense even though everything is real and not staged or altered in any way. This project was for me from the get-go an attempt to express how this city makes me feel. I tried though my photography to do justice to what I believe is a great part of the essence of the divided capital.

The places that I present here through my pictures made such a huge impression on me from the first time I came across them. I was born and raised in Athens, Greece but, my mother being from Cyprus, I had visited the south part of the island numerous times throughout the years on vacation, not the capital though. Then in the period between the summer of 2002 and the spring of 2003 I got to spend significant time in Nicosia as part of my mandatory service in the Greek armed forces stationed on the island. Unlike the locals, who had grown accustomed to this haunting and intriguing scenery, I was unprepared, disturbed and inspired.

After the end of my army duty, I returned to Nicosia with this project in mind. It took me a while to get started but in 2006 I decided that after studying, teaching and working with different aspects of applied photography for over ten years, the time had come to start working full time on personal long-term photo projects. Nicosia in Dark and White is the first one of these projects.

The pictures here were taken over a period of ten months (Sept. 2006 to June 2007) with a Mamiya 645 ProTL, on black and white roll film, printed on 16x20? fiber based paper and selenium toned.

[Their versions here are scans from negatives.]

Thodoris Tzalavras is a Greek photographer, currently based in Cyprus.
In 2010, along with writer Ioanna Mavrou, he established the independent imprint Book Ex Machina, through which they released the monograph Nicosia in Dark and White.