Our contemporary post-industrial informa-
tion society –characterised more than any-
thing else by the fact that the service sector
of the economy generates more wealth than
the manufacturing sector- has obviously
reached its limits. One symptom of this
massive social shift is increased urbanisa-
tion, which is inherently accompanied by a
decrease in and ageing of the population in
rural areas.
Christophoros Doulgeris was born in Serres
in northern Greece in 1975. Located in
Central Macedonia, Serres is the capital of a
largely agricultural district, with a focus on
tobacco, grain and livestock. Since the late
20th century, it has also become a centre for
the production of textiles and other manu-
factured goods. As a child, Doulgeris then
moved with his family to the German city
of Essen. The Northern European society
he encountered during his youth in Essen
was in the midst of a painful paradigmatic
shift from a largely industrial (primarily coal
and steel) to a service-based society and
economy. Among his ‘heroes’ at the time
were a number of representatives of the
so-called Düsseldorf School of Photography,
students of the conceptually-based photog-
rapher couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, who,
already in the early 1960s, set out to make
an encyclopaedic photographic documenta-
tion of the rapidly disappearing monuments
to the region’s industrial culture. It is thus no
coincidence that Doulgeris would later study
Sociology at the University of Crete and then
Photography at the Camberwell College of
Arts in London, thus setting the tone for his
future career as a socially engaged photo
artist.
Christophoros Doulgeris sought to document
this seemingly unstoppable trend and its
effects on the rural population of his home
country of Greece. The shift from an agricul-
turally and industrially based economy to a
post-industrial service society, compounded
by the outbreak of the global economic
crisis in 2008, has left its mark on numerous
levels.
The fact that Christophoros Doulgeris is
indeed an artist –and not merely a photog-
rapher with a background in sociology- is
supported by EUROBAK
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