The Jealous Photographer
Alexandros Mastroyiannis grew up in Athens—a city he loves without qualification, calls it a wonderful metropolis—and was then moved as a teenager to Swansea, Wales, which he describes as a really terrible place. He hated it there. He’ll also tell you that Swansea furnished him with enough absurd anecdotes to last a lifetime, which is the closest thing to a silver lining he’s willing to offer. After Swansea came Exeter, prettier and quieter, small enough to navigate on foot. He was nineteen when I talked to him and announced, with complete sincerity, that he hoped he would never get older.
He started taking photographs four years ago—the day before he enrolled in a school photography course, as it happened, which he credits with teaching him a great deal. The art teacher who ran it told him that some of his photographs were extraordinary. He decided to keep going. His mother had always taken great photographs. Something about this felt continuous rather than new.
The archive tells a familiar origin story: forests, motorsport, kittens. The wholesome vocabulary of someone testing what a camera can do before they know what they want to say. That phase didn’t last. Now he photographs his friends—they’re all fortunately very photogenic
—alongside jumping girls, masked figures, the occasional dead coyote. He shoots mostly on a Yashica T4 because it’s reliable and produces decent results, but he also collects cameras bought as junk on eBay, most of which he’d be the first to call useless. Recently he found an old 110 camera that he and his brother used as children, the one that stamps tiny Ninja Turtles into the corners of every frame. He couldn’t wait to finish the roll.
He has no interest in digital. Shot with one once, found the results flat and wrong. Analog is just much more interesting.
A photograph of his friend Clare’s foot stands as evidence of sorts: Clare, he says, is a lovely girl, but their mutual friends have always made fun of her feet—they look like pig’s trotters, apparently. The night he took the photograph, Clare cut her foot on something and bled across the entire floor. He finds this story compelling. So do I.
The work he keeps returning to is Dana Lauren Goldstein’s. He bought her magazine Don’t Cry Tonight and couldn’t stop thinking about it. His explanation for why it hit him so hard is disarmingly honest: I think it’s mostly because I’m jealous of her. Her life seems so much more interesting than mine.
He’s nineteen, living in a small English city, already Googleable—which makes him feel both sad and, he admits, kind of cool. He can’t leave the house without a camera. He saves everything, collects everything, can’t throw anything away. The feeling of having something to hold onto, he says, is indescribable.
Photography, he clarifies, isn’t the final destination. The real ambition is filmmaking—writing and directing his own short films after graduation. The photographs are a present-tense pleasure, something done for its own sake, not yet in service of anything larger. That lightness won’t last. But right now he has a roll of film with Ninja Turtles in the corners, and he hasn’t finished it yet.