The Jealous Photographer
Alexandros Mastroyiannis was nineteen and had been shooting for four years—started the day before he took a photography course that helped. Athens, then Swansea, then Exeter. That age where the hunger shows in everything you make.
He was jealous of Dana Lauren Goldstein. Not the petty kind—the kind that means you’re really paying attention. He’d bought her magazine Don’t Cry Tonight
and couldn’t get over how much more interesting her life looked. That kind of jealousy is honest. It tells you what someone wants and how far away it still feels.
Analog only. Yashica T4, mostly. Digital felt false to him, too flat. His subjects were his friends—they were photogenic and liked what he made, which kept it going. He had other cameras scattered around, eBay finds mostly, but the Yashica was the one he used. The one he trusted.
He’d found an old 110 camera from his childhood with his brother, the kind that printed Ninja Turtles in the corner of every frame. He was waiting to finish the film. That patience, that trust in something small and mechanical, felt like the realest thing about him.
The jealousy was the most honest part. It showed you the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be. That gap is where the work happens.