Constantine “Costa” Manos was an American photographer known for his images of Boston and Greece. He was a member of Magnum Photos. Manos, the son of Greek immigrant parents, was born in Columbia, South Carolina.
In 2002, I took one of his workshops in Maine focusing on street photography. His critiques were excellent and frank. To this day, I think I know what Manos would say about a photograph. The workshop was educational and humbling.
I especially love Manos’s color photography. The colors are bold and crisp. He taught me to see color in new way. At the time, I had never seen colors like that in photographs. In the preface of his 1995 book entitled American Color (no longer in print), Manos explained:
My favorite pictures have always been complex ones which ask questions and pose problems, but leave the answers and solutions to the viewer. These are images with a long and evolving life, in which the photograph may transcend the subject and become the subject. Central to the strength of these images is photography’s most precious and unique quality, believability: that the moment preserved on a piece of paper is true and unaltered, that it really happened and will never happen again.
The photos in American Color are not captioned and they don’t need captions. They make me think. What’s more, they show that you don’t have to travel to exotic places to make wonderful images. As Magnum President Cristina de Middel explained, “[h]is ability to capture the poetry of everyday life with unmatched sensitivity and a keen eye for light and color has left an indelible mark on the history of photography.”
