Exhibition
«Images of Athens from the Benaki Museum’s Photographic Archives»
at the Athens International Airport
(March 12 – July 15, 2018)
From Monday, March 12 to Sunday July 15, 2018 the Athens International Airport will host the exhibition «Images of Athens from Benaki Museum’s Photographic Archives». It is the first individual partnership between the Benaki Museum and the Athens International Airport, which involves the presentation of 2 thematic exhibitions, representatives of Greek Culture, through the collections and the archives of the Museum, within 2018. The exhibition is hosted at the exhibition area «Art & Culture» at the arrivals level.
Already in the early years of the invention of photography (1839), Athens attracted foreign photographers, who, as their Greek counterparts did later on, systematically captured the archaeological monuments of the capital of the newly founded Greek State. For a long period of time, the city itself did not attract their interest since its rebuilding was still in progress, while the scars of the long Ottoman domination remained vivid.
In the years to come, and as Athens continued to develop, professional and amateur photographers meticulously depicted the capital as it offered a multiplicity of themes. The current images, selected from the collection of the Photographic Archives of the Benaki Museum, illustrate a series of views of the city centre, its squares, as well as its central roads, from the mid-19th century up to the late 1960s.
The Athens International Airport hosts in its premises a fine selection of images from the Archives of significant Greek photographers, safeguarded by the Benaki Museum, and valued both for their historical significance and their aesthetic excellence. This exhibition offers to the viewer a unique experience to travel back to an Athens that no longer exists.
Exhibition area «Art & Culture», Arrivals Level – Entrance 1, free access
Duration: 12.3.-15.7.2018
