[...] We started in 2005, thinking that we were looking for visual material for a documentary about the migration of Greeks to America, but discovering these treasures we realized that we needed a first step that we called Archive Preservation Project, for the copying, preservation, research and maintenance of this material through the non-profit company "Proteas", which collected the material and made it available to become not only a film and a DVD, but also an exhibition and a book.

The photographic material is often forgotten photographs of unknown photographers that were donated by Greek-American families to various archives, or collected by collectors. However, some photographs are of well-known photographers who dealt with the subject of migration in general and took photos of Greek immigrants among others. These include Augustus Sherman, who was an inspector at Ellis Island, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Wallace Kirkland, Andreas Feininger, our own Nelly's and Fiotakis. The gaze of these photographers gave us, at different times, valuable images that transform into memory and history. Not only because they captured stolen moments of reality, unfolding before us the everyday life as it changed over time, but also because each photograph has the aesthetic of their gaze and the era it belongs to.

For "The Journey: The Greek Dream in America" we narrated with Alexandros the story of migration and the life of Greeks in America, using selected photographs from the material collected by "Proteas" from American archives (and 2 photographs from the Benaki Museum). We divided this story into three cycles:

I. Immigrants: 1890-1920
II. American citizens: 1920-1960
III. Return to Greekness: 1960-1980

An appendix, after the third chapter, presents different material: ship tickets, passports, school diplomas, newspaper covers, letters.

And while the film, the exhibition, and the book were gradually taking shape, the material itself and the story it tells revealed an idea that always existed within us, but now took shape. The unknown photographs and films give us the lost collective memory, the regained time, but also allow us to see the present and the future with a different perspective, bringing us face to face with a discovery: the acceptance of diversity can be valuable for a society that knows how to evolve. At the same time, this material reminds us how important it is to accept diversity ourselves, at a time when Greece has become a place of migration for other peoples. [...]

Maria Iliou