“Photography has always been it for me,” says Anna Kiparis, who discovered her passion for the medium at the age of 15.
The child of Greek migrants, she was raised in the working class suburb of Sunshine, where she grew up observing and documenting the backdrops of families not dissimilar to her own, establishing a life for themselves away from the mother country.
Now over 20 years on, and the photographer’s gaze has slightly changed to ‘post-immigration’ life.
This has culminated over the past two years into her latest series ‘Homage’ opening at Off The Kerb gallery this month.
Featuring a selection of photographs shot by Kiparis in the dead of night across Melbourne’s west and north, the series sets out to examine the strangeness of post-immigration suburban life, and the homes built to house those complex lives.
And in the process, the photographer says she started to notice a common pattern of the lived experience of nostalgia evidenced through the structures of each home.
“What I found was people genuinely wanted their space to emulate a little bit of what they had back home,” she says.
“Whether they’re immigrants from Spain, or Turkey, or what have you, they all wanted to bring that nostalgic part … and it came through in the artistic design of their home.”
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