Kristina Willamson's One Year on Kythera,

at The Half King Photo Series, November 17, 2015

The Half King is located at 505 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

Opening night talk & book signing
Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 7:30 PM

Please join us November 17, when American photographer Kristina Williamson will share her project One Year on Kythera, about a small Greek island whose population, 13,000 at the start of the 20th century, numbers 3,100 now.

Funded with a Fullbright grant, Kristina lived and worked among Kytherians for over a year. Her goal was to learn how emigration, modernization, and globalization have affected its tightly knit community. As she evolved from stranger in a mythic land to neutral participant in lively, small village life (replete with small-town rivalries), her pictures transformed too.

By the end of her stay, she had gained and given trust with Kythera's people, and created images rich in narrative, color, and emotion. Not least, she formulated the questions that wound up defining her endeavor, among them: When entire villages are abandoned, how do the island's inhabitants absorb their past? How does the local endure in the age of the global? She found that "the small towns of the world (like Kythera and my her own hometown in Pennyslvania), those yet to be trampled by global brands or overrun by international capital, are more alike than we think."

The opening will feature a slideshow and discussion with Kristina, led by Anna Van Lenten, curator of The Half King Photography Series. (more here). Copies of her book, One Year on Kythera, will be available for sale.

One Year on Kythera was awarded third place for Best Documentary Photography Book at the International Photography Awards.

KRISTINA WILLIAMSON is an American artist born in Argyl, Pennsylvania in 1980. She holds a BFA in photography from Parsons The New School for Design in New York and was awarded a Fulbright grant to photograph life on the Greek island of Kythera. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Greece, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as various group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. In 2014 she published her first monograph of photography entitled One Year on Kythera. Her work has also appeared in Parkett, Photo District News, VICE Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, among others. Williamson currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

@HKPhotoSeries / #hkphotoseries

The Half King is located at 505 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011