ATHENS, GREECE.- The 13th International Month of Photography in Athens is celebrating its 20th birthday, bringing to the galleries, museums, foundations, cultural centres and foreign institutes of Athens forty-seven solo and group exhibitions. The photographers are Greek and foreign, of different generations and backgrounds, and present to the city photographs wildly diverging in their approaches.

Every year the International Month of Photography in Athens creates a programme that runs around various drifts: a thematic approach that is usually divided into sub-themes within which the main core of the year's exhibitions fit; a retrospective of an established Greek photographer if not more; a series of carte-blanche exhibitions; group exhibitions of young photographers just out of school, one of which is the "Young Greek Photographers" which has been running since 1987 as well as other group exhibitions. Last but not least, the Month of Photography is accompanied by parallel events such as meetings, discussions, seminars, workshops, etc.

This year's Month of Photography is about people, about those who photograph and about those who are photographed, and how they are "immortalised" on the photographic print. Part of it is a study on this familiar and easily recognisable landscape called the face, which is however so hard to define. A study approached through the deconstruction of the "portrait" in order to recompose it, by magnifying in order to decipher shapes.

The main themes "On Faces" is divided into three sub-themes, or rather approaches:

1. The photographer's ethics: How does the photographer see the social events he/she depicts? Photography, which began as an objective depiction of reality, has had to deal with the falling apart of this myth of objectivity and of the accepted truth, something that has brought about serious questions as to how photographers position themselves ethically before what they see, and as to their use of photography itself.

2. Allegory in photography: By this we mean to show photographic work that is staged, that is carefully composed and where the place of things has been purposefully chosen. In this manner symbols and faces, light and shadows, objects which seem to belong elsewhere somehow begin to talk about a new reality as seen by the artist. A reality that is struggling to be taken as such, a thought that is on the lookout for new companions.

3. Ambiguity in the photographic portrait: Traditional depictions of faces have been replaced by new approaches, approaches that give us an end result somewhat distant from the familiar human form. "Ambiguity" travels between what is and what appears to be, just like we human beings travel between the visible and the invisible.