Vicky Mousoulis comes from Adelaide and has had a passion for photography since picking up her father's Minolta camera when younger.

The 9 images in this her first exhibition reflect the richness of life and people in Greece. 

The Magic of Photography
by Adrian Martin

Vicky Mousoulis is a creature of the image. She takes them, collects them, treats them, scatters them online – all the time, obsessively. Photography is a true passion for her, and she lives and breathes this passion. Her interests and tendencies run the full gamut from observational, documentary work, to full-blown, digital surrealism. And she shows us, as well, how much fertile ground there is between these two extreme poles of visual art: between the carefully worked-over ‘painted photo’ and the snapshot of fugitive happenings.

Is the ‘Greek magic’ in this selection of photographs a property of the fascinating thing observed, or the alert eye/mind that observes them? Doubtless a mixture of both things. Sometimes the magic comes from the choice of a frame, an angle; sometimes it arises from a moment spontaneously lived and captured. At times we might imagine something has been staged, posed, nudged into a more expressive mode of existence via a well-turned touch of artifice; at other times, the reality of a street, a face, a gesture, seems to speak to us directly, through a fortuitously situated lens.

It matters little, ultimately, how we decide, as viewers, to apportion the balance of artifice and realism, spontaneity and manipulation, in Vicky Mousoulis’ work: what counts is the poetry of the end result. And what rich, intoxicating poetry it is.

© Adrian Martin, October 2015