Photography Will Kill You
“Photography will kill you,” my mother warned after I was attacked and left without my equipment during a mugging in my hometown Athens. Her sentence became the embodiment of my struggle: not merely a warning but a reality — a quiet truth that to make art is to step into a state of perpetual disequilibrium. In the years following my PhD, moving between continents and speaking with artists across the world, I kept circling this absurd condition — a conflict that belongs to every age.
This project emerged from this recognition: the strange grace of creating despite everything that crushes us, a Sisyphean labour. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder uphill for eternity. In thinker Maurice Blanchot’s writing, the myth becomes a metaphor for artistic work, where the creator is “a hero of insane torment,” pushing the translucent weight of vision not toward completion but toward the gesture
itself.
As a Blanchotian reader, I return to Sisyphus as a figure of worklessness — a task that resists ending yet insists on being performed. Layering fragmented depictions of Sisyphus onto photographs of solitary desert boulders, reworked with charcoal, the series embraces the unfinished: to build, to blur, to begin again.
Find out more:
Website: ioannasakellaraki.com
Instagram: @ioannasakellaraki_photography_