A prince of Greece reclaims his land in photographs with Toronto show ‘Resilience’

An Olympus OM-10.

The camera that started it all for Prince Nikolaos. Gifted to him when he was 13, maybe 12, by his parents, King Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie (the last king and queen, respectively, of Greece). A gizmo that spurred a lifelong passion for photography, wavered a tad when digital became a thing, but is back in full force, as made manifest by the exhibition of his work that just opened in Toronto.

Before the opening last week, held at the Tin and Copper Smith Building on Yonge Street, he was giving me the spiel as well as a personal tour.

“All the pictures are about light,” he was saying. “And a lot are about Greece, because we could not go to Greece for a time” — that whole deposed thing when his father was toppled by a military coup in 1967; his family sent off to live in a kind of existential exile — “so when I did finally did go back I fell in love instantly.”

“Resilience,” the 53-year-old second-born son then enunciated in a kind of transatlantic burr that rings of his birth in Rome, years in London, schooling at Brown University.

The erstwhile royal playboy-turned-landscape photographer, who comes off as charming as he is erudite — one could see why he mounted many an eligible bachelor list back in the ’90s, was oft spied with women like Elle Macpherson and had a rep for being a man about many towns (like Gstaad and Saint-Tropez) — went on to say that all the photos here were taken during lockdown in Athens (where he was finally allowed to move back to a few years ago with his wife, Princess Tatiana, she of Venezuelan stock and a former event planner).

“If Nikolaos’ photographs convey anything, they convey a reverence for the panoramic beauty of his country — a country that has gifted him a title, but destroyed his heritage,” is how the editor of British GQ, Dylan Jones, put it not long ago in a profile of the aristocrat. “The prince is rebuilding his life in Athens, and as he is unable to involve himself politically, so he is embracing the arts as a way to forge a relationship with his new home.”

Indeed, I do myself detect a kind of ambassadorship at play in his work: a prince reclaiming his land. Albeit, in the manner of a deconstructionist. Something that took on even greater import when he was chosen to represent his country in the Greek Pavilion at the London Design Biennale in 2021 at Somerset House. This, after his debut solo show, “Phos: A Journey of Light,” held in Melbourne in 2018. Since then, he has exhibited in cities ranging from Copenhagen to Doha. And now … Toronto, in this exhibition hosted by Ergo Holdings and its president, Peter Polydor. (This city, after all, has long had one of the biggest diasporas of Greeks in the world, the eighth largest according to the General Secretariat of Hellenes Abroad).

That light, man. It certainly gets the prince rhapsodizing, as it did this eve just as the shindig started filling up with guests, here for a princely sighting. “That crisp, crisp, crisp light; the light that you get against the blue skies and the blue sea,” Nikolaos said. “It is no coincidence that over the millennium people have been talking and writing about it, painting and photographing it.”

So have you nailed it? I felt I needed to ask. Is there an actual science behind that crispness of light?

“I have a theory,” he hit back. “Particularly in the more spring/summer, sometimes autumn, months, we have a north wind that clears up all the clouds. That north wind comes all the way down from Russia, so it is completely dry. No humidity. It is just incredible.”

Turning to one large-scale photo in particular of the Acropolis — one that looks like a painting and something of a digital manipulation, at once — he explained: “I play a lot. But I do not play with Photoshop. I play with nature itself. It is a photograph of the Acropolis taken from the reflection from a photo lens out of a body of water.”

His process? “I spend a lot of time in the sea. A lot of my work, as you can see, is abstract, but abstract reflections in the sea, whether it is just blue or black, if you are in the middle of nowhere or if you are near land, like Santorini, which has the high cliffs. I have taken photographs that look like archipelago, but in fact are just reflections on the rock. So I said: I want do this more. I want to find new colours. I do not alter the images. Everything you see is what I see.

“Nowadays,” he added, “everyone has Instagram, you have Photoshop and AI. But what I always say is: nature will produce all the colours you want if you are in the right place in the right time and if you are patient enough.”

Coming just months after the death of his father — King Constantine was mourned in an emotional tableau in January and then buried as a private citizen in Tatoi, the former summer residence of Greece’s royals just outside Athens, where his parents and ancestors are buried — there is a kind of wistfulness to many of the photographs. Almost all of them, Nikolaos said, make up what Greece represents when you unpack it: the sea, the vine, the olive tree. “The whole theme is based on water, wine and olive oil,” he mused.

The sea, no doubt, evokes some memories of his father who, famously, was a member of Greece’s gold-winning sailing team at the 1960 Rome Olympics. The olive tree, in particular, meshes with the whole idea of resilience, given that “some olive trees can last up to two and a half thousand years … They’ve been here well before us and will be here well after we’re gone.”

Some early inspiration — for following one’s interest, indulging one’s passions — he admitted, came from his paternal grandmother, Queen Mother Frederica. “She lived in Madras before it became Chennai (the capital of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state),” he noted, surprising me a little with this tidbit. After they left Greece, he elaborated, she moved to India to study Indian philosophy, of all things. “When she had passion for something, she wanted to learn about it, including nuclear physics! At the age of 60!

“She taught me about the light,” he said, waving to various photographs in which the light of Greece remains an eternal, never-ending fixation.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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