About me
Vassilis Tangoulis is an International Award-Winning Black and White Fine Art photographer based in Greece. Vassilis is mostly known for his Black and White long exposure landscape photography but he also experiments in color and tries to enter this technique to different photographic genres.
Vassilis Tangoulis leads a double carrier as an academic teacher-Lecturer and a fine art photographer. He is a physicist working in the Chemistry department in Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and despite his full time carrier has also found success following his lifetime passion of photography. He has been a recipient of international award for his Black and White long exposure work.
He was born in a small Greek town –Karpenisi surrounded by mountains and was really lucky to be a “village” boy. He had the opportunity to see sceneries that influenced his viewpoint and perspective and maybe unconsciously defined the absolute meanings of words like “sunset”, “snow”, and many others; all important ingredients of a landscape photographer. He left Karpenisi at the age of 11 and spent some 20 years in different towns and the last 10 years Vassilis lives in Patras, a beautiful town near the sea. Neutral density filters came into his life and a new surrealistic world has been revealed…From that moment he gives all his creativity to elaborate and explore this new world.
Actually, he is open to both color and B&W photography. 80% of his work is B&W because, simply, those photos cannot work in color. Generally, he believes that B&W photography has more color than color photography because the multiple variations of possible grays, if treated correctly, can reveal much more depth and drama than color can offer.
He is drawn to Long exposure photography because it allows him to add a fourth dimension– i.e. time– to a three dimensional object. His photography is a 4D object leaving its footprint, its “trace,” in a 2D layer. When this happens for a 3D object, it is easy for a mind to visualize its 3D morphology. In order to envision a 4D object, however, one needs the power of Fine Art photography.
For him Fine Art photography is an alternative way to express a common subject so that each individual artist can reveal secret aspects about it. In order to do this, each artist experiments with light, time, and spatial coordinates– and then through one’s processing, one reveals a subject framed in a transformed world in which its dimensions can be easily described and visualized.
He always try to leave a message behind his photos. For him every photo has symbolic meanings and sometimes he leaves the symbols to speak for themselves but there are times he has to give a guidance and this is usually the title he chooses for a collection. He works with collections of photos (sets of 5 or more) and this because he always needs a concept when he takes photographs. Taking a photo is always a serious matter for him and if there is no concept or no message prefers to stay silent. After all Ansel Adams said it much better : “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”