GAYLETTER

Helias Doulis is a 23 year old photographer from Greece who currently lives and works in London. His most recent project is titled Parabyss: A Nurtured Nature and features images that explore “the way that homosexuals tend to isolate themselves in order to live freely and away from the threatening ‘public eye.’” This series was shot at Limanakia; a rocky and secluded corner of Greece where Helias felt he and his models could fully access melancholy. Photographs featuring naked men on a tragically beautiful private Grecian coast? I’m into it.

We decided to get to know Helias a little better and asked him some questions about this body of work.

Helias told us that Parabyss is “an earthly vagina, where a dystopian paradise shelters the frightened males, giving them the freedom to show intimacy with one another.” Helias elaborated further by telling us that the photos in this series “reflect the greed of human nature in a world that persecutes its creatures through discrimination, forcing them to resort (to the) creation of a habitat of free sexual expression.”

In regards to his inspiration and what his work is really about, “the main reason that I started taking photographs was to express my personal insecurities and inabilities to perform (in) my relationships and society, to find more insecure bodies and souls like mine to make all of us embrace the beauty of loneliness.” Helias selects his models to be members of his personal melancholy, and refers to them as his multiple “alter egos.” As you can see from these photos, he chose to hide the faces of his subjects. “Every model represents a different aspect of myself; therefore, each photograph of mine is an incomplete self-portrait.”

Helias likes to shoot deep in nature because it presents the possibility of “never being found again;” he fantasizes about “bodies being left alone in adverse weather conditions, as they are meant to be.” For Parabyss, Helias took his models to Limanakia in order to “make them feel isolated and protected, away from the public eye.” He explains that, “This place has given me and my alter egos the chance to be more accessible to melancholy.” Maybe we all need to get out of the city more often and get naked on some large rocks.

Helias thoughts on Queer visibility: “Queer visibility differs from country to country, and this has no certain feeling in it, and cannot be filtered. While the number (of) countries where homosexuality is legal increases, and makes us feel hopeful, at the same time, about 80 of them recognize homosexuality as a sin or illness, bombarding their societies with propaganda against homosexuals in every possible way. It is every person’s responsibility to take us a step forward in what we call ‘humanity’, and especially through people that have the strength or the ability to inform people about the physicality, and what somebody would mention as ‘normal’ in terms of physical and emotional affection not between men and women, not between men and men, and neither between women and women, but between bodies and souls.”

Below are some images from this body of work: