A collection of nearly forgotten black-and-white photographs from the 1990s has found new life in a recently published photobook that offers an intimate glimpse into Greece's state bureaucracy. The book, titled "7 a.m. – 3 p.m.," features the work of photographer Michalis Patsouras, who documented daily life inside a Greek ministry while working there as a civil servant. Published by Hyper Hypo, the 96-page hardcover book presents images that seem to belong to another era entirely, with smoke curling over cluttered desks, towering stacks of paper, and faces illuminated by fluorescent lighting.
Patsouras wasn't simply an outside observer documenting the bureaucratic system – he was part of it. His unique position as both employee and photographer allowed him unprecedented access to capture the inner workings of Greek public administration during what he describes as "the height of Greek bureaucracy." The photographs, which lay dormant as negatives in a drawer for nearly 30 years, have now emerged as both personal diary and historical document.
The photographer's journey into both bureaucracy and photography began somewhat accidentally. The son of a military officer who was regularly transferred around Greece, Patsouras found himself in Didymoteicho, a quiet town near the Turkish border, after finishing high school. His introduction to photography came through a dusty darkroom kit discovered in a loft and a half-forgotten Olympus Pen EES-2 camera. "Once I started developing film, I was fascinated. I decided I wanted to become a photographer," he recalls.
Moving to Athens to study at the Focus School of Photography, Patsouras lived in the downtown neighborhood of Petralona. Through a well-meaning uncle familiar with the public sector, he was offered a steady government job. "He said: 'Why don't you work in the ministry? You'll earn some money, pay for school, and you won't have to work too hard.' And that's how I entered the public sector – completely by accident," Patsouras explains. The irony of an aspiring artist working inside the bureaucratic machine wasn't lost on him, but instead of rejecting the system, he turned his lens inward.
As a machine technician in his early years at the Ministry of Commerce on Chalkokondyli Street – an interwar modernist structure designed by Munich-educated architect Emmanouil Kriezis – Patsouras had access to every corner of the building. "I went from office to office, fixing typewriters, photocopiers, and fax machines," he remembers. "When I finished, I'd take a picture." His camera was a Leica M6, loaded with Kodak Tri-X film and developed with HD-110, a chemical developer once used by renowned photographer Ansel Adams.
The technical choices were deliberate and contributed to the distinctive atmosphere of his images. The combination of equipment and chemicals gave his photographs a grainy, almost muddy texture with the soft contrasts characteristic of fluorescent lighting. "If I had perfect grays and whites, it would have looked like something else. I wanted that atmosphere – the feeling of the fluorescent lamp," Patsouras explains. He sought to capture the rhythm of the workday between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. without any staging, flash, or artificial lighting.
The resulting images form what could be described as a bureaucratic fresco – an anatomy of public life during Greece's tentative transition into the digital era. The photographs range from mundane to surreal: towering piles of folders on dented metal shelves, employees smoking behind stacks of forms, a clerk ascending a Kafkaesque staircase with documents in hand, and memorably, a man exercising on a stationary bike in the ministry basement. There are also images of crowds spilling onto the street after bomb scares, which Patsouras notes with dark humor "somehow always happened after 12 p.m.," hinting at possible inside jobs.
"It was the height of Greek bureaucracy," Patsouras observes. "Everywhere you looked, people were carrying papers, pushing trolleys full of folders. In the corridors, cabinets overflowed with documents. In the basements, Dexion industrial shelves were packed with files bound with string." The photographs capture not just the physical environment but also the human element – the fatigue, boredom, and quiet moments of connection among colleagues sharing pastries or taking smoke breaks.
Crucially, Patsouras insists his work was never intended as criticism or denunciation of the system. "It's easy to judge – to say, look how bored they are. But it wasn't their fault. Everyone does the same when there's no motivation. It's how the system works," he explains. Instead, there's a strange tenderness in these images that reveals the quiet humanity within the bureaucratic machine. His approach was both aesthetically and ethically considered, influenced by masters like Garry Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
"Every time I lifted the camera, I knew I had only one shot," Patsouras says. "We learned from Winogrand and Cartier-Bresson – don't crop, get the frame right. That limitation made us better." Over time, he became invisible to his colleagues, allowing him to capture authentic moments. "When people see you won't give up what you are doing, when they stop noticing you, that's when you capture the real moment."
Among the images is a telling self-portrait: the young photographer's reflection in a ministry elevator mirror, camera in hand. This image hints at the project's underlying narrative – the story of a young man realizing that the system he's documenting is also consuming him. After several years, Patsouras was transferred from his roaming technical position to a desk job in the ministry's procurement department, a change that proved decisive.
"That's when I felt I would die there," he admits. "As a technician, I could move everywhere. As an office clerk, I was confined. That's when I decided to leave." He completed the photography project around 1998, two years before resigning from the ministry. "I told myself, once it's finished, I'll go." The negatives were then stored away, quietly aging through the nation's many transformations: the millennium, the economic boom years, the financial crisis of the 2010s, digitization efforts, and various reform promises.
The ministry that once employed 1,200 people now operates as the General Secretariat of Commerce with barely 300 staff members. Austerity measures, wage cuts, and administrative reforms swept through the analog system, though never quite erasing it entirely. In this context, Patsouras's photographs function as both personal documentation and collective archaeology – a record of a working culture that has largely disappeared, even as its institutional structures persist.
"At the time, I didn't realize the value," Patsouras reflects. "Years later, I understood: It wasn't just my story. It was a historical document." The rediscovery and recognition of the work's significance came gradually. In 2022, he exhibited the series at the Photometria International Photography Festival in Ioannina, followed by a showing at the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale 2023, where curator Hercules Papaioannou of the MOMus Thessaloniki Museum of Photography recognized its importance and later wrote the accompanying essay for the book publication.
Subsequent exhibitions in Larissa and Athens built momentum toward the Hyper Hypo photobook publication. The richly printed hardcover volume allows the images to speak largely for themselves, though readers might wish for more detailed captions providing backstage context. Today, Patsouras continues working as a professional photographer in Athens, focusing on long-term, human-centered projects. His work has received several awards and is part of the permanent collection of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography.
The long dormancy of the "7 a.m. – 3 p.m." project seems particularly appropriate given its subject matter and the changes that have occurred since. The work needed time to mature and find its meaning in a transformed world. Its slow development stands in stark contrast to today's instant digital culture of optimized and aestheticized imagery. Patsouras remains unsentimental about both eras, noting, "I'm not one of those who look back on the past with nostalgia. It was a beautiful period of my life, full of creative exploration – but I'm not longing for it."
At the recent photobook launch at Hyper Hypo's headquarters in central Athens, many of the people Patsouras had photographed decades earlier attended the event. Now gray-haired pensioners, their presence lent the evening a strange intimacy and confirmed that his quiet, patient camera had never been regarded as intrusive. The photographer had succeeded in entering what he calls "the belly of the beast" not to expose or condemn it, but simply to listen to its heartbeat and document the human stories within an often-criticized system.
