Marrickville Eikons
Exhibition description
As part of the Australian Heritage Festival 2021, Marrickville Library is pleased to present iconic photographs of the Greek community in Marrickville, taken by Emmanuel Angelicas. Raised in the suburb, long term resident Emmanuel Angelicas has taken photographs for five decades, chronicling the changing face of Marrickville and its citizens.
These stunning monochromatic images are just a taste of the photographer’s archive and show aspects of the Hellenic influence. By the middle of the twentieth century, Marrickville was a major centre for Greek immigrants, often referred to as ‘Little Athens’. Over time, shops and businesses with a strong Greek identity became accepted as part of the wider Australian community and enriched our municipality. Through these images, older residents will smile with recognition and younger ones can connect with our recent history.
Artist bio
For fifty years, photographer Emmanuel Angelicas has roamed the streets of Marrickville, recording his neighbourhood in startling black and white images. His archive of negatives and digital images is huge and this exhibition showcases just a few of his iconic images of the Greek diaspora and their influence on our suburb. Marrickville’s complex identity owes much to the arrival of Hellenic migrants in the 1950s and 1960s and this is recognised today with the area’s affectionate title of Little Greece. Emmanuel Angelicas’s photographs span the generations with poignant images of those early arrivals and their descendants.
As he grew up in Marrickville, he became serious about the medium. He bought better cameras and graduated from the University of NSW with a degree in Visual Communication and postgraduate diploma in Professional Art Studies with further visual arts qualifications from the University of Sydney. The technology of photography has changed, but Emmanuel continues to record in black and white and is happy to use both film and digital cameras. His attitude to photography has never wavered either. “Every time I shoot in Marrickville, either in my home or on the street – I am still this seven-year-old boy curious with his camera…”