"My brother Charles and I first visited Greece in late July 1954. Charles had been invited to the country by his friend from university, Petros Nomikos. As his younger brother, I followed him. A few days after our arrival in Athens, Petros informed us that he would take us to his hometown island, Santorini. We drove to Piraeus and boarded the Miaoulis. Unlike the other old steamships of the Greek merchant fleet - most of which were second or third-hand purchases from Northern Europe - the Miaoulis was brand new: the Italian government had granted it to Greece as war compensation. After a calm overnight journey, we entered the Caldera, which I later learned is the largest marine crater on the planet. When Charles and I first arrived on the island, we were told that its population was about 12,000 inhabitants, mainly rural families who cultivated grapes, tomatoes, or wheat; also fishermen, quarry workers, and sailors, who worked as sailors or captains on ships that sailed around the world under the Greek flag. The initial core of the island consisted of non-volcanic limestone and marble, but during the last 600,000 years, multiple volcanic activity created or destroyed entire pieces of land, leaving today five islands and islets above the surface of the sea. Three of them are fragments of the aforementioned ancient volcano that collapsed in the 16th century BC.

In 2006, I exhibited in Fira a series of these photographs that I took in the 1950s. I remember an elderly woman who burst into tears. In those days, she told me, the island's inhabitants still said good morning to each other and offered a glass of water to their neighbor. This sense of community disappeared with the high demands and pressures of commerce, she added. It disappeared - as in Mykonos - the old harsh way of life that had shaped the character of Santorini for generations. The dramatic changes in the personality and fate of the island in the last 65 years led Margarita and me to take action, to document with words and images a Santorini that no longer exists."

(Robert A. McCabe, from the Foreword)