{"id":42337,"date":"2025-09-05T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/muse.international\/?p=42337"},"modified":"2025-09-05T03:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T03:41:13","slug":"interview-yiorgos-michael-european-photography-awards-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/muse.international\/index\/interview-yiorgos-michael-european-photography-awards-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"When a Hotel Room Becomes a Poem – A Story with Yiorgos Michael"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For Yiorgos Michael, photography is both a medium and a companion, a way of holding memory, silence, and emotional residue. His conceptual images of temporary and anonymous spaces invite viewers into a shared reflection on what lingers after departure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yiorgos Michael Q1<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Thank you. I\u2019m a self-taught artist working between photography and poetry. For me, photography began as a way of translating my inner world into something visible. What we perceive outside of us is always filtered through memory and emotion, and the camera became a way of catching that tension \u2014 between the world as it is, and the world as it feels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My earliest images were taken while travelling, in hotel rooms and anonymous spaces. At first, they were simple records of where I was, but slowly I realised they mirrored a deeper sense of transience and estrangement. Over time, my practice has grown more conceptual \u2014 blending staged gestures, blurred figures, and architectural spaces that carry emotional weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, photography has become not only a visual medium but a companion \u2014 a way of holding silence, absence, and residue. Winning this award affirms that these quiet explorations can also resonate outward, beyond the personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q2<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Someplace \/ Not Here \/ Still There, But Not began as a ritual during travel. I started photographing every hotel room I stayed in \u2014 spaces that were temporary, impersonal, yet strangely intimate. From there, the project grew into city streets, corridors, and thresholds, all places that seemed to echo a state of being in-between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At its core, the work is about presence and absence \u2014 the residue of identity in transient spaces, the echo of what lingers after someone has left. Sometimes I use my own body as a blurred or obscured figure; other times the emptiness itself carries the weight of estrangement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winning this award feels significant because the project emerged from private vulnerability, yet it touches on a condition many recognise \u2014 not fully belonging, yet leaving traces behind. It marks a step in my journey from documenting presence to creating images that hold ambiguity and silence as their own kind of truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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