Robert McCabe: Lively Matter A Photographic Record of Santorini from 1954 to 1964

Santorini winery Vassaltis Vineyards, and sister hotel The Vasilicos Santorini are proud to celebrate their 10th anniversary with a solo exhibition of photographer Robert McCabe, Lively Matter: A Photographic Documentation of Santorini from 1954 to 1964, curated by Christina Petkopoulou.

The exhibition features work from the photographer’s first journeys to the then-isolated island, capturing its people, unique landscape, and the layered imprints of life that together formed a living entity. McCabe’s work returns to Santorini, finding a home at Vassaltis Vineyards, where, blurring the distinction between interior and exterior, the building’s open architecture allows Santorinian nature to invade the spaces where local wine is produced.

This exhibition focuses on how McCabe’s lens captured the traces of the symbiotic relationship between the people of Santorini and the island’s geological, mineral, and marine environment, as well as the vivid, tangible essence of its materials. With the sensitivity of a naturalist rather than the gaze of a traveler, the photographer documented mid-20th-century Santorini, a time when its inhabitants lived with the arid, volcanic land—coexisting with the fantasy, the experience and the historical myth of a possible catastrophe. Stone, ash, sulfur, the dense fruits of the land, the unfathomable depths of the Aegean, and its strong winds alongside sailors, working women, laborers, fishermen, animals, and archaeological remains appear as active agents of Santorini’s history, that is here narrated bottom-up.

In this way, McCabe’s photographs become “portraits” of both human and non-human elements that shaped life on the island. A “tender” archaeology, his photographic work documents the existence of a community that lived and evolved within the ruptures of ecology and economy. McCabe’s now historic work underscores an acceptance of fragility and a cultural animism that shaped life and defined an era in the history and modern culture of the Cyclades.

The exhibition is hosted under the auspices of the Municipality of Thira and the 2025 Year of Authenticity Programme. It is accompanied by the excellent edition Santorini: Portrait of A Vanished Era, 2020, by Robert McCabe, containing essays by Margarita Pournara, Patakis Editions.

Duration: April 15th to October 30th, 2025, with an opening event on May 24th, in the presence of the artist and the exhibition’s contributors.

Venue: Vassaltis Vineyards, Vourvoulos,  Santorini.

Text : Christina Petkopoulou