Is it because the subject takes him deep into his memories? Nikos Aliagas’ voice is suddenly deaf when he talks about his photographs. Far from the jolly juggler image of the show Star Academy or The Voice, the man reveals a serious face when he talks about the job that matters most to him: the making of these black and white images dominated by portraits of men and of women encountered during his travels.

His tone then becomes melancholic, reflecting an aspect of his personality that he fully assumes. “I didn’t call my exhibition ‘Le Spleen d’Ulysse’ for nothing,” he evacuates with a smile. “Yes, I am haunted by the question of the passage of time. Yes, I see, like everyone else, the years go by with concern. The only thing I have found to oppose this inescapable aspect of existence is to live each moment fully and try to capture the most significant of them with a shot,” he continues.

Nikos Aliagas also recalls the day he discovered at his grandparents’ house, in a shoebox, a series of sepia portraits. “People in the pictures weren’t smiling. I understood by contemplating them that, for them, the photographic process was serious. His father gave him a Kodak Instamatic for his tenth birthday. The young Nikos then begins to immortalize what surrounds him. His gaze goes first to the leftovers (“the empty plates, the crumbs on the table that testified to a shared moment”) but also the hands of his loved ones. “They tell a lot about us, whether their palms are soft or calloused, fingers damaged by manual work or not,” he recalls.

His first book, published in 2018 by Editions de la Martinière, was titled L’Épreuve du temps. He gave to see images of his native Greece but also of his wanderings across the planet: from London to Los Angeles. “To know how to look is to live”, he justified then, by evoking that the photographic gesture was for him as for the poet Denis Roche: “The meeting of a time which passes without stopping and a time which do not pass. »

Four years later, his new work is in the same vein. “The photo has, for me, a lot to do with a face-to-face with Chronos, this Greek god of Time and Destiny who devours his children,” he emits. His images, he says, help him cure the melancholy that sometimes assails him. “Photography, like travel, carries with it pain and consolation! The Greek word which means to leave [“?????? / nóstos”] is the root of the word nostalgia, this pain of exile that Odysseus experiences during his Odyssey but which is also a promise of return”, he testifies.

The power of this portrait speaks for itself. The look of this man says more than a thousand words. His images testify to Nikos Aliagas’ talent for “capturing the beam of darkness that comes from his time”, as Giorgio Agamben writes.

* Jumièges Abbey, until October 31.