Sergis Hadjiadamos

Sergis Hadjiadamos works with photographs that have failed in the very task for which photographs are usually valued: preservation.

His practice begins with a privately held archive of approximately 17,000 early twentieth-century photographic glass negatives. All of them have been severely altered by humidity, chemical instability, pressure, and time. Emulsions have fractured or dissolved. Negatives have fused. Faces have disappeared; figures overlap; surfaces carry marks that were never part of the original exposure.

Sergis does not approach these negatives as material to be restored. He is not attempting to reconstruct an original photographic condition, nor to recover the archive as a stable historical record. He works with what the images have become.

That difference matters.

A damaged negative is not simply a photograph in poor condition. Once deterioration has altered its surface, displaced its emulsion or fused it with another image, the object has already entered another state. It still carries photographic information, but it also carries the effects of processes that occurred long after the camera was used.

These later interventions were accidental. Sergis's are not.

Through high-resolution scanning and digital manipulation, he isolates fragments, enlarges forms, separates figures and, in some cases, allows the accidental relationships produced by deterioration to remain intact. A stain can become a field. A fractured emulsion may resemble topography. A figure almost erased by time can be removed from its original context and made to stand alone.

The work begins in this tension between what the archive has done by itself and what the artist chooses to retain.

There is no shortage of material. The archive contains thousands of possible images, distortions, collisions and fragments. The act of selection therefore becomes central. Sergis does not claim authorship over the deterioration, but neither does he treat accident as sufficient. He decides which accidental forms have acquired enough visual and conceptual force to continue as artworks.

In Almost Vanished Friends, figures extracted from severely deteriorated photographs are removed from the circumstances in which they were first photographed. Their names, relationships, and biographies are unknown. What remains is far less complete: a body, a gesture, an item of clothing, sometimes part of a face.

Their presence is still visible, but their identities are not recoverable.

The title sits precisely inside that contradiction. These people have not disappeared completely, yet most of what would once have made them knowable has gone. The photograph preserves their appearance while withholding almost everything else.

This is one of the recurrent conditions of Sergis's work. Visibility does not necessarily produce knowledge.

Strangers Forever begins from another condition found inside the archive. Glass negatives that were never intended to share an image became physically fused during storage. Unrelated photographs, made at different moments and containing people who may never have met, now occupy the same surface.

The fusion is material before it is symbolic.

Sergis does not separate these images to restore their previous independence. He works with the collision as it exists. Figures pass through one another; bodies and faces occupy the same photographic space. Historical strangers have become physically inseparable.

The resulting images are not montages in the conventional sense. Their first combination was produced by storage, deterioration, and time. The artist's intervention comes later, in recognising what those accidents have made possible.

In Out of Nowhere, the human figure largely disappears.

Here Sergis isolates areas of chemical deterioration whose forms begin to resemble coastlines, lakes, rivers, mountain ranges or aerial views of unfamiliar territory. None of these places existed in front of the camera. They were generated by the decomposition of another image.

The photographic surface begins to produce its own imagery.

This reversal is important. Photography usually records something that once stood before the lens. In these works, forms appear through the destruction of that record. An image emerges from the breakdown of another image.

Across these bodies of work, the archive is no longer a passive container of historical photographs. It behaves more like an unstable material field. The negatives continue to change. They deteriorate, combine, erase, and occasionally generate forms that could never have been anticipated by the original photographer.

Memory in Sergis's work is consequently not something that can be recovered. It is fragmented, overwritten, and, at times, permanently inaccessible. A photograph can preserve the trace of a person while simultaneously losing the information required to know who that person was.

Evidence and absence coexist in the same object.

There is a particular irony here. Photography has often been associated with the arrest of time, yet these negatives demonstrate how vulnerable photographs themselves are to time. Their chemistry changes. Their surfaces break apart. Information disappears. Images migrate into one another.

The object created to resist forgetting can itself forget.

Sergis does not attempt to resolve this contradiction. Nor does he turn deterioration into a sentimental image of loss.

The archive belongs to another period, but the work is not primarily nostalgic. It does not try to reconstruct a vanished social world or invite the viewer into a comfortable relationship with the past. Its concern is more difficult: what happens when an image survives physically but no longer retains the stability of its original meaning?

Damage, in this context, cannot be understood simply as destruction.

It removes information, sometimes irreversibly. A face may be lost. An identity may never be recovered. An entire photographic scene may become unreadable.

But deterioration can also produce forms, juxtapositions and visual structures that did not previously exist.

Sergis works inside that contradiction without attempting to neutralise it.

His intervention begins where conventional preservation might conclude that the image has been compromised. The damaged photograph becomes not the end point of an archival failure, but the material from which another image can be developed.

The work therefore remains connected to photography without being contained by it. It remains connected to the archive without treating the archive as fixed evidence. Painting, photography, digital manipulation, accident and historical residue enter the same visual field without resolving neatly into one category.

What matters is not the recovery of an original image.

It is the transformation that has already taken place, and the one that follows through the artist's intervention.

What has the damaged image become?

For Sergis, that question is more productive than asking only what the photograph once showed.

What remains is neither the original photograph nor its restoration.

It is another image.

Sergis