5 Short Photo Stories, the Greek Way
| 02/19/21
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Upon finishing his Writing and Film studies in 2015 in the United Kingdom, Helias Doulis returned to Greece where he shot his first semi-autobiographical feature film, The Nest. This first endeavor initially came without any particular aspirations to ever dip in the field of photography, but Helias felt he found his personal artistic form.
His series ''Parabyss: A Nurtured Nature'' became his first expressive approach across Europe and the U.S. His fashion editorial was a collaboration with the iconic American fashion house of Ralph Lauren in 2018, where he photographed their RRL campaign. He diverted from using the western traditional approach and introduced a queer element in an urban landscape for the modern cowboy.
His obsession with adult cinema brought him to Paris, London, and finally to Athens, shooting films with the men he adored younger. Helias just completed his short film, The Beauty of Stigma while collecting material for his zine entitled Pale Blue Nostalgia, expected to be released in 2021.
Helias works as a freelance photographer and filmmaker in London, available worldwide -- for any enquiries, please, contact hello@heliasdoulis.com
A man is born within the white rocks of the Earth's vagina - a coast painted white due to a volcanic ejaculation. He is the very fruit of this eruption, a 'blooming' peach across the face of a lunar surface. He forms his yet unknown sand-made other with a caress in the rough Grecian landscape. The now rotten peach will dry out, staring into the sunset of a last love... amo.
We've learned to live behind the darkest blinds, in the temple of an expelled sexuality, thinking that we're alone and not unique. They've hidden us from seeing and being seen, through a heteronormative light that commands what is true, yet not just a habit. We poured ourselves into the woods to smell each other's unprecedented lustful eyes, being taught steps of a non-lived adolescence. Until we're left alone again, now concealed from the life that waited for us, digging for change in our family business's pocket to watch the shameless lives of others.
Shortly before turning off the last lights of the deserted city, among the neon signs of the old factories and the fresh cement of the building sites of Molivos, the lover of poet Nikos - Alexis Aslanoglou, enveloped himself in the rubble of a naive heart of the concrete world. Cradled naked through the garbage from which he came, the eyes of the Poet dress him with the holy light. In the arcane details of his body, where the seduction of Venus is hidden, the world of the poet is no longer a frosty brothel, permanently open. It is a world living only for the two of them, hidden within the violent night.
Colby Digital is a photographic landscape filled with the once-idolized American porn-star Colby Keller and his downfall of political views. The series focuses on the Greek Queerness and its stereotypical representation of the homosexual male body. Nature, pays homage to the photographer's early work on the male form and the subject's masculine era, while when in nurture, the body embraces clothing of a pornographic identity of a 70s set, spreading cinematic views of its industry and leading to the fading physic of hard bodies and the representation of a lonely life, photographed in full intimacy and nostalgia. The Beauty of Stigma of a career in sex and its deconstruction of the American dream sensing a community that feels more sensitive than ever.
Parabyss is an earthly vagina, where a dystopian paradise shelters the frightened males, giving them the freedom to show intimacy to one another. While desire reduces us to weakness, we suddenly realize that the modernity of human relationships grows between a metaphorically yet realistic aspect of hunger, which seems to cannot avoid wear or death. The photographs reflect the greed of human nature in a world that persecutes its creatures through discrimination, forcing them to resort the creation of a habitat of free sexual expression, away from the eyes of disapproval in the cities. The physical landscape becomes an artificial barrier between the world we live in and the world we fantasize about, when dreaming of a refuge that wholly accepts every aspect of sexuality, nature and nurtured nature.