First of all thank you very much for your contribution to our project. Can you please introduce yourself for us?

Hello thank you for the invitation, my name is Alexis Vasilikos and I'm from Athens, Greece, where I currently live. I studied photography in a couple of schools in Athens (Focus and Akto) and for a brief period of time I studied art history at D.A.M.S. in Bologna, Italy. At the moment I'm about to go to Leros, which is an island on the Dodecanese and the place where I usually spend the summer. I'm currently working on the design of a small publishing project, which is called ‘Rigpa Editions’ and I'm in the design process of the identity and the first series of products.

How did you start in photography?

It started quite casually with a friend introducing me to the medium when I was around 17 years old. Later on, when I was studying art history in Italy, I realised that I didn't like the theory so much and so I started to spend my days walking around the city making pictures and I haven't stopped ever since.

What inspires your work?

My work revolves around the so called everyday life so everything is potentially an inspiration. In terms of the inner experience, photography is like a portal that lets me enter in the state of no-mind or emptiness. This is why I often associate the artistic practice with the spiritual practice.

How would you describe your visual language?

The way I see it is that art ends language, it leaves you without words, so it is fundamentally a language of silence, but if I had to speak about it in terms of particular characteristics that I find essential, I'd say: spontaneous , loose , playful, joyful, light.

Who are your favourite photographers / artists?

The "problem" with favorites is that you exclude so much and in doing so we ignore how much interconnected we all are, I like to feel that we are all one big family. Having said that here are a few artists whose work I love: Saul Leiter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Luigi Ghirri, Federico Clavarino, Jessica Backhaus, Andre Kertesz, Rinko Kawauchi. And as for more contemporary ones you can have a look at ‘Phases magazine’, which is a web magazine that I've been co-editing with Jerome Montagne for the last 5 years, and where we present regularly contemporary fine art photography.

What are your main interests as an artist?

For me art is a doorway to the sacredness of life, a kind of communion and at the same time a game. It is a game because it is all about enjoying the process of creating and sharing what comes out of it. From the point of view of spirituality it is a process of refining the consciousness so that it can realise itself or empty itself from identification with ideas. Of course within the practice itself there are particular interests, for example now I'm working on a new series for an exhibition and the main focus of this series is water and seascapes, but the name of the series is ‘ The Journey Home’ so again it goes back to the same topic, the quest for self-knowledge and freedom.

What’s your favourite movie?

I don't think I have a favorite movie, but I enjoy very much ‘Man on the Moon’ with Jim Carrey. I like this type of radical humor, I feel that it's a form of acknowledging the cosmic joke element of life.

What is your favourite photo book?

I don't have one but I do enjoy very much one of the older books in my library: ‘Storylines’ by Robert Frank.

Thank you very much for your time and contribution to analog magazine.

Thank you very much. Keep up the beautiful work!

All images © Alexis Vasilikos