Konstantinos Ignatiadis is one of the most talented and profound portraitists of the last half century – while at the same time he has remained almost virtually unknown to the wider public. Working as official photographer for the collection and exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Ignatiadis met and worked with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, befriended them, and photographed them for his private practice, producing meditations of such unspeakable beauty, clarity, and sincerity that they go far beyond what is traditionally thought of as “portrait photography”. In this mind-blowing work, his first to be widely available, Ignatiadis has selected seven of his favourite photographs (portraits of Jean Bertholle, Jean Charlesblais, Francesco Clemente, Loïc Le Groumellec, Aurélie Nemours, Julian Schnabel, and Richard Serra) to be the subjects of signed and numbered hand-printed gelatin silver prints, encased in a bespoke fabric-lined clamshell box that resembles a camera.

Konstantinos Ignatiadis was born in 1958 in Ioannina, Greece. After brief studies in Physics and Mathematics, he left for Paris where he remained until the turn of the last century. During his twenty-year-long stay, he met, mingled, lived, and socialized with an impressive array of intellectuals and artists, while at the same time working as a photographer for the Centre Georges Pompidou M.N.A.M. in charge of photographing its impressive collection and contemporary exhibitions. He has shot for major publications among which Jean Dubuffet’s prints, as well as Daniel Cordier’s, Henri Creuzevault’s, and Yvon Lambert’s private art and book collections.