Photographer Voula Papaioannou dies

Voula Papaioannou was born in Lamia in 1898 but grew up in Athens. She became involved with photography in the mid-1930s, photographing antiquities and landscapes of Attica on behalf of institutions such as the Archaeological Museum. With the outbreak of the War, she began to depict life in Athens, while during the German Occupation she secretly photographed scenes from hospitals and the famine in Athens. Thanks to the Swiss Committee of the Red Cross, her photographs were published in Europe and helped to break the blockade of Piraeus. Papaioannou, with the help of Giannis Kefallinos, released the "Black Album" in just four copies, which included 83 photographs of children and adults emaciated from starvation. But, as photographer Platon Rivellis points out, "Photographing misery as misery is easy. The purpose of art is to put a footnote of optimism in despair. Voula Papaioannou did that naturally." After the War, Papaioannou took over the management of the department of photography of UNRA, capturing post-war Greece through her lens. She stopped photographing in the mid-1960s and later donated all her work to the Benaki Museum. She died in Athens in 1990.