December 2004-January 2005

The Mount Athos Center took the initiative to display, in cooperation with the Photography Museum of Thessaloniki, on the premises of the Museum, a segment of the archive of photography of Fred Boissonas concerning the Holy Mountain.  The photographs that were presented at the exhibit comprise a representative selection from the two missions of the Swiss photographer to Athos in August of 1928 and October of 1930.

Fred Boissonas was, without a doubt, the most important photographer of the Greek landscapes during the first decades of the 20th century, leaving us material of the highest artistic value and invaluable historical worth.  His archive, which has also been housed here for a few years in the newly established Photography Museum of Thessaloniki, is a point of reference for all those who want to come into contact with Greece as it was before it underwent the tumultuous changes that followed primarily after the Second World War.

 

For the complete presentation of this significant material, the Mount Athos Center has published a catalog in which exists a full photographic rendering of the archive.  It is accompanied by a series of scientific texts, as well as a text which Boissonas wrote himself during his first trip to the Holy Mountain.

In the spring of 2007, the Mount Athos Center presented a large part of the collection in the exhibition space of the Nedelkos building