What do these images from Makronisos, Gyaros, Leros, Ai-Stratis, and the other islands show? Why do they concern us? Such contemporary photographs of old places of exile and confinement will not alone evoke anger or emotion. Those who lived there a life on hold, in a time of destruction and daily horror, do not need them to remember.

Should this era close then? Should we not remember it anymore? Should the Aegean wind finally take it away, scattering it into fragments? Should the desolate islands become piles of stones and wild grasses or new tourist destinations? Before the past sinks, at the moment it leans, we need to contemplate it.

Perhaps then these photographs of 'monuments of the recent yesterday' concern us because they possess a particular contemplative character? Perhaps they are not photographs-representations but rather photographs-thoughts, images that capture something of the shadow cast by exile on our official history?

Indeed, their time is contemplative. It exists through its suspension. It exists as a thought that thinks about time, precisely because it can observe it halted. And it is stunning to think about time -the time of life and the time of history- while holding your breath.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]