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Re-Imag(in)ing Arcadia: British Intervention in the Post-War Reconstruction of Greece, c. 1945-1946

Moschovi was commissioned to author this chapter for the multidisciplinary publication Greece and Britain since 1945, which brings together leading academics from the wider area of Humanities, journalists and novelists to explore the transformation of Anglo-Greek relations since the end of WWII. Moschovi’s chapter examines the ways the postwar British relief aid was pictured by two local photographers, Voula Papaioannou and Maria Chroussachi, aiming to show how politics, ethnographic trends and western narratives of Greece are determinant in understanding the photographic record as well as the motivation behind the relief work itself. The research combined, for the first time, photographs from the Benaki Museum and the National Gallery of Greece with unpublished archival material kept in the British Red Cross Archive, the Imperial War Museum, The National Archives at Kew and the UN archive in the United States, making hypotheses that contribute new understanding in the under-researched area of post-war Greek photography, as well as question the truth value of the photographic document, its use as historical evidence in the period in question, and its later recontextualization in the art museum. Parts of this research have been internationally disseminated in two invited talks at the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College London (January 2010) and at Firestone Library, Princeton, U.S.A. (May 2010). This project expands research and ideas around the premises of postwar orchestrated documentary practice that were first examined in Moschovi’s introductory essay in Greece through Photographs (2009) and more extensively in her essay “The Pure and Unadulterated Photography", which, commissioned by the Benaki Museum, Greece for the retrospective publication Dimitris Harissiadis (2007/2009), anchored the homonymous exhibition that showcased, for the first time in grand scale, the largest collection of negatives and photographs of Greece’s post-war reconstruction.