Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Houses Enchanting Exhibit for New Book on Greece
By Mark Frangos
Special to The National Herald

NEW YORK – Housed in the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, photographs from Robert A. McCabe’s book, “Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, 1954-1965,” allow Greek Americans, Spaniards and other visitors to admire approximately 50 black and white photographs taken by Mr. McCabe during a decade’s worth of visits to the Greek islands.
The exhibition, which runs through August 25, is in honor of Queen Sofia’s Greek heritage and many of the pictures were taken in the summer of 1954, the same summer the Queen met her future husband, King Juan Carlos of Spain, who was then Prince. The images are meant to capture the people and landscapes of an era and way of life which have all but vanished due to tourism and development. On both floors of the exhibition, a looped recording of Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s most famous poem, “Ithaca,” can be heard recited by Oscar-winning actor Sean Connery and set to original music by world-renowned (and Oscar-winning) Greek composer Vangelis.

Mr. McCabe first visited Greece in 1954 on the Achilles, via the Corinth Canal, as an undergraduate studying English Literature at Princeton University.

In the decade which followed, he made many other visits, traveling the islands of the Aegean Sea with a Rolleiflex and Plus-X film. His photos were first exhibited in 1954 at Princeton’s Firestone Library and in an ensuing traveling exhibit.

They were exhibited at the Olympic Gallery in Manhattan (what is now the Olympic Tower) in 1979. Since then, Mr. McCabe’s photos have been displayed at the Art Association in the resort town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming and in Greece at exhibitions in Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras, Santorini and Anatolia College.

This summer, Mr. McCabe will exhibit photos from the 1950’s of Greece, Italy, Paris, the U.S. and Antarctica in an exhibition in Monodendri, Greece.

“For me, the most successful photographs represent a form of poetry and go well beyond the depiction of a person, an object, a place, or even a satisfying visual composition,” Mr. McCabe writes in one of several signs of his words, hanging on the walls besides his photos. “Just as a short poem can create a vivid emotional experience, so too can an image. Such photographs can invoke in our souls much more than the direct visual content of the photograph.”

Mr. McCabe’s photos depict a different time in Greece, before the islands became tourism hotspots.

“In the 1950’s and 1960’s, travel in the Greek Islands was fraught with hardship and uncertainty. There were few actual docks on the islands, so in most ports, passengers were transferred to a small, often bobbing, tender to travel the last 100 meters to their destination. Small children were frequently half-tossed from the steamer to a parent or sailor on the tender,” Mr. McCabe points out.

“The islands were very poor. Tourism had not yet taken root. Many families had members who had immigrated to the United States, Canada, Germany or Australia. The island populations were in equilibrium with their land and ocean food resources. With remittances from the émigrés frequently a balancing factor, there was also extraordinary hospitality which were a rare sight to many places,” he says.

“We would consider an island ‘spoiled’ if there was even one other visitor present. The landscape was still unspoiled. Villages throughout the country were beautiful, not only architecturally, but also for their unique and distinct traditions. Stone was often the basic building material with all the discipline of design imposed by that medium,” he adds.

His book, “Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, 1954-1965,” captures all that and more, and is a powerful nostalgic reminder of the Greece which once was.

The Spanish Institute is located in Manhattan on 684 Park Avenue. For more information, call 212-628-0420 or visit the web at www.spanishinstitute.org.