George Koutsouvelis

Projects

morse signals

EMERGE

imagine

Where you stand

TWILIGHT INTERIOR

poem for two strangers

in search of contact

about

Born 1974. Zakynthos island, Greece.George Koutsouvelis is a visual artist, photographer, and educator based in Athens, Greece. With degree in Computer Science and certification as an Adobe instructor, he brings a unique synthesis of technical precision and artistic vision to his practice. For over a decade, George has developed experiential, project-based workshops in photo editing and photographic thinking, fostering contemplative engagement with the medium.His work has been exhibited internationally in Athens, London, Sharjah, Milan, and Hyderabad, and recognized with awards including first place at the 2020 International Mobile Photo Awards. Through his practice, George explores the invisible forces that shape our perception of place, time, and human connection.

statement

My work explores how absence shapes presence—how what remains unseen determines what we perceive. I photograph liminal spaces and fleeting moments: solitary figures caught in urban darkness, street lamps dissolving into fog, light filtering through rain-soaked glass, forgotten cassette tapes on wet pavement. These aren't documentary images but visual meditations where the everyday becomes poetic and memory blurs into reality.Working as a mobile photographer, I use my smartphone to stay close to the world and respond immediately to what appears. This lets me work unobtrusively, capturing moments as they unfold without technical barriers coming between perception and image.My practice draws from the Slow Art Movement—I create sequences meant to be experienced slowly, inviting viewers to pause and complete the narrative with their own memories. Recurring themes include impermanence, solitude within crowds, and the paradox of connection in our digitally mediated lives. Each series functions as a visual essay, asking questions rather than providing answers: How do we see? What do we remember? How do we relate to one another when screens frame so much of our experience?In an era of endless scrolling, my photographs are an invitation to stop. They ask you to look closer at what's slipping away.

Selected Exhibitions

2025  CYNCHRON-e-CITIES, t.a.f.: The Art Foundation, Athens, Greece.2023  Exposure Photo Festival, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.2022  Influx Gallery, The endless exhibition , Notting Hill London.2021  Indian Photography Festival , Hyderabad, India.2021  ImageNation Milan: The new aesthetics, Milan, Italy.2019  Venus Gallery, Reflect on me, Mykonos island, Greece.2018  Saatchi Gallery, On Rain, London.

Interviews/presentations

Hocus Photus35 mm by ManiannaMoments CollectiveiFocusEdge of HumanityJapan Camera HuntersPhotologioEFSYN newspaper ( EN/EL)

prizes/awards

2022  12th Annual International Mobile Photo Awards (MPA), Honorable Mention.2020  10th Annual International Mobile Photo Awards (MPA), 1st Place Winner.2018  LensCulture Street Photography Awards, Editors Pick.

books/zines

UNDER THE SAME LIGHT (2019)

What does light look like in Tehran versus Helsinki? In Mexico City versus Athens? This collaborative zine brought together ten mobile photographers from eight countries to answer a simple question: Can we find connections in how we see, even when we're looking from vastly different places?For nine months—January through September 2019—we each documented our cities, our daily lives, our particular corners of the world using only our phones and shooting exclusively in black and white. No theme beyond the light itself. No requirement except honesty. The result is a visual conversation across borders, a collective diary that reveals how much we share even when the details differ.The real discovery was seeing how isolation and connection, beauty and struggle, appeared again and again across continents. Same light. Different shadows. This project reminded me why I love collaborative work—it proves that photography, at its best, is a language we can all speak.Details:Format: Digital ZineContributors: Ana Fernández Quirós, Armineh Hovanesian, Taru Latva-Pukkila, Sarah Fairbanks, Nana Bour, Franc Ortiz Rodrigo, Ayhan Ton, Charles Read, Ramón Cruz Guillen, George KoutsouvelisCountries: Spain, Finland, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Greece, USA, MexicoMedium: Mobile photography, black and whitePeriod: January–September 2019

NOIR STORIES (2017)

This is a book of stolen moments—photographs taken during lunch breaks, on holiday mornings, in the margins of ordinary days. Between 2015 and 2017, I kept my phone ready, watching for scenes that carried a certain weight, a noir sensibility: shadows that felt deliberate, figures caught in ambiguous light, moments that suggested stories I couldn't quite name.Noir isn't just an aesthetic—it's a way of seeing. It's the understanding that beauty often hides in darkness, that mystery matters more than clarity, that the best images leave questions unanswered. These single pictures don't form a continuous narrative. They're more like glimpses overheard in passing: atmospheric, suggestive, each one a small story with a touch of melancholy.Published in 2017 by 14&15 Mobile Photographers in Rome, this collection represents an earlier chapter of my work—less conceptual than my current projects, more intuitive. Looking back, I see these images as training grounds for themes I'd explore more deeply later: solitude, urban poetry, the intersection of light and mood. The book is out of print now, but these photographs remain some of my favorites—reminders of when I first learned to trust what felt true over what looked perfect.Details:Format: Printed BookPublisher: 14&15 Mobile PhotographersLocation: Via dei Sabelli 215, Rome, ItalyYear: 2017Status: Out of print

Imagine: An algorythmic dystopia

(excerpt)

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”G.K. Chesterton

Here's an experiment: I didn't photograph anything in this series. Instead, I wrote descriptions—"a solitary figure in a technological void," "urban decay under neon lights," "surveillance cameras watching empty streets"—and fed them to an artificial intelligence. The machine read my words and generated what you see here.At first, it felt like magic. Type a phrase, get an image. But the more I worked, the more unsettling it became. The AI "learned" from millions of existing photographs, absorbing patterns, styles, biases. When it creates something new, is it actually new? Or just a sophisticated remix of what already exists? And if I'm only writing prompts—not framing, not timing, not being present—am I still a photographer? Or just someone operating a very complex autocomplete?The philosopher Vilém Flusser said cameras turned us from image-makers into button-pushers. AI takes this further: now we're just typing suggestions while algorithms decide what "dystopia" or "loneliness" should look like. The machine has opinions, inherited from its training data. It has preferences. And slowly, its vision starts to shape ours.I wanted to name this discomfort. We're building systems that don't just record the world—they imagine it for us. Feed them the right words, and they'll show you nightmares more vivid than memory. The question isn't whether AI can create images. It's whether we're comfortable letting machines define what our fears, hopes, and futures look like.Chesterton said fairy tales teach us dragons can be killed. This project says: first, we need to recognize we're building them.

• back to projects

TWILIGHT INTERIOR

There's a time just before sleep when your mind starts to drift—when memories surface without warning, when the logic of the day loosens and images arrive fully formed but impossible to explain. A hummingbird hovering in a dim room. Your own reflection holding light like a stolen secret. Birds crossing an empty frame.This series lives in that blue threshold between waking and dreaming. Not nighttime as the clock measures it, but as your interior self experiences it—the place where symbols speak louder than words, where a white dress in a mirror can carry the weight of every lost summer, where a figure dissolves into its own outline because that's how memory works when you stop trying to hold it still.I started making these photographs when I realized I was tired of documenting what's literally there. The world as it appears never felt as true as the world as it resonates. So I began constructing scenes—staging, blurring, doubling—trying to externalize what the unconscious already knows. A bird against the moon because that's what yearning looks like. A face half-dissolved because that's how we remember people who've left. Light cupped in raised hands because hope isn't abstract, it's something you physically hold and offer.The blue that saturates these images isn't accidental. It's the color of the hour before dawn, the color of deep water, the color your closed eyelids see when you press on them. Liminal blue. The color of the boundary between here and elsewhere. Everything in this series exists in that suspended state—neither fully present nor fully absent, neither entirely real nor entirely imagined.I think of these as photographic poems, where meaning arrives through feeling rather than explanation. A toy horse on a table. A striped pole reflected in water. They don't represent specific memories—they're structures for memory. Spaces you can project your own twilight moments into. The photographs ask: What does longing look like? What shape does wonder take when you can't quite name what you're wondering about?If you've ever woken from a dream unable to shake its mood, even after the details fade—if you've ever felt reality thin out at certain hours—you'll recognize this blue interior. The photographs won't tell you what they mean. They'll just hold space for whatever rises when your own rational mind steps back.

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EMERGE

Light doesn't just illuminate—it transforms. Watch how morning sun moves across a wall, slowly erasing the night's sharp shadows. How a face caught through rain-streaked glass becomes something between portrait and ghost. These moments fascinated me: the in-between states where nothing is fixed, where everything hovers at the edge of becoming something else.This series started with a question: What does transformation look like when you're in the middle of it? Not the dramatic before-and-after, but the uncertain space between—the chrysalis stage, when you're neither what you were nor what you'll be. I photographed light dissolving edges, figures blurring into their surroundings, textures shifting as brightness moved across them. Spider webs catching dawn. Bodies of light reflecting and distorting. Surfaces that seemed solid until light revealed them as permeable.There's a word I kept returning to: becoming. Not arriving, not being—but the ongoing process. Like watching someone's face change as understanding dawns. Like the way grief slowly becomes memory. The photographs here don't tell you what to see. They're spaces to reflect on your own transformations, the moments when you felt yourself dissolving into something new, uncertain if you'd emerge intact.Light here isn't just subject—it's collaborator. It wears down edges, softens borders, reveals what's waiting beneath. And maybe that's not dissolution. Maybe that's how we emerge.

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poem for two strangers

A fish
and a bird
can fall in love
But where
will they make
their nest?

You can sit next to someone for years and still wonder what they're thinking. Share a bed, a table, entire days—and somehow remain strangers. Not because you don't speak, but because speaking doesn't guarantee you're heard. Not because you're not together, but because being in the same room isn't the same as occupying the same world.I made these photographs using double exposures—two images layered onto one frame, each holding its own space while bleeding into the other. The technique felt right because it's exactly how modern connection works: we overlap without quite merging. We exist simultaneously, side by side, but somehow separate. Transparent to each other. Present but not entirely there.The opening verse asks it plainly: what happens when two beings love each other but live in fundamentally different elements? The fish needs water. The bird needs air. They can meet at the surface, briefly, but they can't build a home there. So they hover in that impossible space—close enough to see each other, too far apart to truly touch.I kept noticing this gap everywhere. Couples sitting together, each absorbed in their own phone. Hands that don't quite reach. Bodies in the same bed facing opposite directions. The final image makes it literal: two people together, a padlock between them. Locked in proximity but sealed off from real access. We've learned to be alone even when we're not.These double exposures aren't about blaming anyone—not technology, not modern life, not each other. They're just trying to name the strangeness of contemporary intimacy: the way we can share everything and still feel unseen. The way proximity becomes a substitute for presence. The way we've built entire relationships in the margins, the overlaps, the spaces where we almost meet but never quite merge.Maybe the fish and the bird don't need a nest. Maybe their poem is written in the moments they surface together, knowing they'll dive back into separate elements. Maybe what we call loneliness isn't the absence of others—it's the presence of distance even when distance shouldn't exist. These images don't solve that. They just ask: if we're strangers even to the ones we love, what does it mean to truly be known?

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in search of contact

Have you ever noticed how a stray dog moves through the city? How it watches people pass, hopeful for a glance, a gesture, any sign that someone sees it? How it navigates a world full of life yet remains fundamentally alone?I kept thinking about that image—the stray searching for connection in a place that doesn't quite make room for it. It felt like a metaphor for something we don't talk about enough: the loneliness that can exist even in crowded spaces. The way you can be surrounded by people yet feel utterly invisible.This series presents two perspectives. The color images show the world as most of us see it—vibrant, full of possibility, alive with movement. Cafes, streets, gatherings—the exterior we present. But the black-and-white photographs shift to another viewpoint: the stray's perspective. Stark, stripped down, searching. The same spaces, but emptied of color, reduced to shadows and longing. It's the world as it feels when you're on the outside looking in.I'm not interested in making grand statements about modern isolation. I just wanted to sit with this tension: the gap between how we appear and how we feel, between the lively surface and the quiet ache underneath. Between being seen and being known.Maybe you've been both—the observer and the stray. Moving through bright spaces while carrying something gray inside. Looking for a moment of real contact, wondering if anyone notices. These photographs ask: What does it take to truly see someone? And what do we miss when we only see the surface?

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Morse signals

(excerpt)

Darkness isn't just the absence of light—it's a space where everything uncertain lives. When night falls, time stretches. Shapes dissolve. What remains are the essential emotions: fear, loneliness, the raw need to reach out and be heard.This series began with a simple observation: we send signals constantly, yet we rarely know if anyone receives them. A text left on read. A gesture misunderstood. The city at night became my metaphor—isolated lights puncturing the void, each one a small act of transmission. Street lamps. Lit windows. The glow of a phone screen. Moments of illumination that ask: Is anyone there?I thought of Morse code—those urgent dots and dashes tapped out in wartime darkness, carrying messages of survival, distress, hope. Every flash deliberate. Every silence loaded with waiting. The photographs here work the same way: fragmented transmissions, visual syntax of people reaching across emptiness, never certain if connection will come.But darkness doesn't last forever. Toward the end of the series, morning arrives. Slowly. Edges soften, outlines emerge, and with them—something like hope. Not certainty. Just the possibility that we might, after all, be seen.

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Where you stand

Stand on one side of a window and you see a dragonfly—delicate wings catching light, a small miracle of nature briefly at rest. Step inside and look through that same glass, and suddenly you're the one trapped, pressing against the barrier, watching a world of golden headlights and distant movement you can't quite reach. Same window. Different truth.This is a series about how much changes when you shift position. Not dramatically—just a few steps, a slight turn of the head, a different angle. But that small shift rearranges everything. What looked like confusion up close becomes something else when you step back and see the wider frame. What felt like absence reveals presence. What seemed like isolation shows connection—or the complicated space between the two.Each pairing here holds two perspectives on a single moment, refusing to choose between them. A scene can be both things at once: beautiful and confining, solitary and surrounded, still and moving. The truth depends entirely on where you stand when you look. Move a little, and the meaning shifts with you.I keep returning to this idea because it feels urgent somehow—the reminder that our view is never complete. That certainty is often just a failure to move, to look again from a different position. These photographs don't offer answers about which angle is correct. They just insist that another view exists, one that might contradict everything the first seemed to say.Maybe that's the point. Not to resolve the contradiction but to hold both truths simultaneously. To recognize that where you stand—physically, emotionally, in relation to any given moment—shapes what becomes visible. The figure studying or struggling. The bird alone or among others. The world open or framed. Both. Always both.These images ask you to shift your feet, tilt your head, reconsider what you thought you understood a moment ago. They ask: What changes when you move? What becomes visible that wasn't before? And what does it mean to acknowledge that your perspective, however true it feels, is only ever partial?