

Sublime Indifference XIX, 2009, archival digital print, 40 x 30.

Installation view: Mouzakis-Butterfly Textile Factory, Iterations II, 2023, 16 photographs on clear film, 8.5 x 21’.

What I Love/Susan, 2019, archival digital print, 19 x 13.

Susannah, 1992, gelatin silver print, 48.5 x 40.

Mother’s Closet VIII, 1990, gelatin silver print, 28X18.

WB12, 2006, archival digital print, 13 x 9.

WB10, 2006, archival digital print, 9 x 13.

WB8, 2006, archival digital print, 9 x 13.

Reverie II, 2021, archival digital prints, 36.5 x 42.5.

Bison, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 71.
SUSAN DABOLL
Text: Avgi Kalogianni | Photos: Vaggelis Fragkakis
In a way I like demystifying things
Susan Daboll was a familiar face and name even before we actually met. I had noticed her tall juvenile figure pass through the Holland Tunnel Gallery, the old Azari house and I had seen her photos in an exhibition at the same space. The interview with Susan Daboll opened for me a window to two worlds: the world of the artist and the world of the wife of the late Takis Dimitrakopoulos who passed in 2020 and their home, the iconic mansion of this historic family, right in the heart of the town of Parikia.
Soon after we had seen and photographed the house, Susan sent me an invitation for “The Butterfly Effect”, an art show held in Athens in autumn 2023. Curated by Kostas Parapoglou at the Mouzakis’ Petalouda factory it featured the work of 41 artists, among them Susan Daboll and Dimitra Skandali from Paros. So, it was only natural to start the conversation from there.
“THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT”
It was indescribable! First, I don’t think that anybody expected that many people; on the opening night there were over 2000! I had ideas before of how to tie it to the ancient Sacred Way, to Eleusis and the Mysteries. When I got to the factory all those ideas just went out the window and I was literally responding to what was in front of me. So, I went in, photographed as much as I could, I saw a pattern develop and targeted my photography towards single elements. Then I happened to watch a music video, liked the kaleidoscopic, acidy, trippy, psychedelic effect of it and thought this was the direction I wanted to go. During the exhibition I chose to be there almost every day. I thought it really important to interact with people and explain. In a way I like demystifying things.
“THE DEATH OF P.C.DIMITRAKOPOULOS”
After Takis died, I was kind of adrift for a few months and then I started to slowly do something. I thought about taking all those photographs that did not fit into a project and turn them into an off book. One day I took a look at the photographs on my desk and realized it was all about Takis’ death. So, then I was able to completely reshape what I was thinking and doing and made the first project about his death. It’s called “The Death of P.C.Dimitrakopoulos”. In 2019 I had done a body of work named “What I love”, a project about things people won’t let go. That led to another body of work called “My husband was an elegant dresser” because I couldn’t let go of his clothing. I ended up photographing all his clothes; they were 145. It was a way to think about him and I put memories under certain pieces. All of these projects were a way to process his death for me.
THE EXPERIENCE OF TEACHING
Oh, God, I loved being a teacher! I did it for 14 years at New York University. I got hired right after graduate school. I taught black-and-white photography, straight, analog. I felt like I could really help the students figure out what the next step was for them in their lives. The first assignment I would give was “A photograph of your earliest memory”. That made people stop and think.
THE FEMALE FIGURE
Βeing tall I felt huge all my life and too intelligent! As a five-year-old the teacher told me I was superior and I took that to heart (She laughs with all her heart)! While at graduate school during a one-week Polaroid workshop my mother called me and said she had found a bag of old Barbie dolls that should be mine. I said “No, I didn’t play with dolls!”. It was a point of pride with me, I was too superior! But I took them and photographed them for the workshop. And that was my first piece in my own voice “I didn’t play with dolls because…” I worked for 14 years on the female figure. I think it was about getting comfortable in my own skin, in my body, resolving issues of self-confidence. This is the 80s, it’s about deconstructing the advertising industry, about what is being imposed upon us and how we normalize it. All that work was about me. In the meantime, I had been photographing Greek statues and reading a lot of Greek Mythology. The next project was called “Mother’s closet” and it was the realization that a lot of what was me, was about my mother. I had mythologized my mother to such an extent that I felt I could never live up to her. She epitomized the ultimate female to me because when she’d get dressed up, she would have the perfume, the hair, the high heels, the jewelry, the make-up, the dress… it was kind of overwhelming to me as a little girl. And we weren’t allowed into the bedroom or to be part of her process.
ANALOG OR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY?
As a photographer I tried a number of different things. I tried fashion, I tried still life, I tried reportage, I tried every kind of photography you could try. I worked for Magnum, I worked in the Photo Research Department but I knew I didn’t want to do any of that, I wanted to do my own things. It was black-and-white until 1995. That year I had like an epiphany. I went to an artist residency upstate New York called Yaddo and realized I was done with the female figure and I was basically done with black-and-white. I married Takis in 1998 and kept working in New York for 4 years and it got to be too hard to go back and forth. I realized as I was living in Paros where I didn’t have my own dark room, that I would have to switch to digital and was really reluctant to do so, it was heartbreaking in a way. So, in 2007 I decided to take all the remaining film I had and photograph a landscape I loved, out of the train windows along the trip from New York to NY airport and beyond. The project was called “A Landscape of Longing”; all the film got processed normally, then processed digitally and printed. I realized it didn’t make any sense to go from film, digitize it and then print digitally. I did my first all-digital project in Paros in 2007 called “A Sense of Place”. The main theme were trees in isolation. I realized later I was mourning Takis’ death in 2007 although he died in 2020. Because he was so much older than me there was always this sense of foreboding. I had been married to him since 1998 but until that project I hadn’t been able to connect to the landscape of Paros.
PRINTING AND EXPERIMENTATION
I have always loved printing. I was at Syracuse University and I would spend 8 hours in the dark room by myself and be perfectly happy. After Magnum I worked at this print lab; they used to print for Magnum photographers there. That’s where I learnt how to really print. I ended up creating my own dark room in Brooklyn, I didn’t develop films, I just printed. I love both printing and experimentation. I did large black and white Ρolaroid film; I used the plastic Diana camera Kodak made for kids. I like to play around with sizes, colors and different kinds of paper. I had a camera obscura. I also did work with a 6foot camera that Jane Pack had built to teach her students at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts. I print everything except when it’s too big. For me a photo is not finished until it’s printed. For a person of this generation an artwork is a digital piece, for me that I am a completely different generation I like the tactility. And I think that’s why I started painting because I was missing the tactility when I switched to digital.
THE PUBLIC: ATHENS VERSUS NEW YORK
In New York unless you are a really big name, a well-known artist, your work can easily be overlooked. You have your show, you ‘ve worked really hard and it’s basically a non-event. It is so much about who graduated from Yale, who we can discover. In Greece the thing that I have found out and really love and appreciate is that there is no age issue. Μature artists are valued, people are really interested in knowing what you were thinking, what you are doing. It’s amazing to me that interaction with the public in Greece, especially in Athens. In Paros on the other hand, it is mostly limited to the foreign community and the art people; there is not much participation from the local community.