It's truly a difficult endeavor to try to describe: why one wants to be a photographer. After reading Susan Sontag's book "On Photography" (1977) I realized for the first time in an epiphany that there are very many more reasons than I was aware, and often a combination of more than one, ranging from practical to philosophical and definitely psychological. Nostalgia? Mortality? Trophies? Gear Lust? Freezing time in an image is a very human process that can be simple from a click of a button to a complicated planned event where everything to the smallest variable is controlled. For me photography is treated as an art as well as a life-journey and thus is subject to the "fruitful moment" or a "fruitful thought" that will make me chase or set the "idea" sought. The truth is important but I do accept manipulation trying to portray an "inner truth" that may be occasionally "darker", more "idealized" or more "hyper-realistic" or possibly the portrayal of one's "Freudian superego". We're coming to an age where nature is attacked and becoming a rarity for the Urban Human. Capturing moments of nature is my attempt to save this beauty that may be lost. In this sense Photographers are truly the hierophants of God's creations. They glorify and promote his magnificence as members of a high religious order. On the other hand is it a cure for my fears? A Don-Quixote setup for my soul and mind? Possibly. It definitely goes deeper, and touches themes as our mortality, our fear of losing the beauty of life, our clinging on moments locked in an image is our desire for immortality that is expressed in an almost pathologically human way. Light is the vehicle of our perception of this world and our camera is our tool in attempting to record it and manipulate it. There is no such thing as a technically ideal photograph, this clinical approach is what separated photography from painting. The art of Painting was liberated through photography from the "tyranny" of realism and was left free to explore the inner self, the dream, the subconscious, the form, the surreal and the imagination of an idea leading to the revolution of modern and contemporary art. Photography was left as the form for recording "realism" being condemned to an almost technical purpose. Far from it though, and even more so in this time and age, photography through the interpretation of light simply by adjusting the "triangle of exposure" or the last two decades through digital means, AI and other advances has been set for a re-birth though a new conceptual revolution as an evolving art undergoes & for which I aspire to be part of...

Panagiotis Apostolopoulos (aka Peter Apostol)