Who He Was
Evangelos Dimitriadis was born in 1917 in Ermoupolis, Syros. He was the second child of Dimitrios (Mitsos) Dimitriadis and Maria Dimitriadis, née Vasiliou. His first sister, Kaiti, was born two years earlier, and his second sister, Gioula, was born three years later, in 1920. Their parents were well-off and relatively highly educated for the time.
When Evangelos was one or two years old (in 1918 or 1919), the family moved to Athens, as Hermoupolis had already begun to decline in importance as a port years earlier, leading to economic decline on the island. However, their love for Ermoupolis and nostalgia for the old days of its social and, above all, intellectual heyday was passed on from parents to children and grandchildren and remained alive in all members of the family until their death. They were all proud of their origins.
After high school, which he finished around 1935, he studied at the Law School of Athens. In 1940-41, he did his military service and in 1945 he married Evdokia (Kia) Gousopoulou, who was originally from Andros. They did not have children. Around that time, he was appointed as a civil servant at the Ministry of Commerce, in Kanigos Square. He worked there for his entire professional life until he retired sometime in the 1980s.
He began pursuing artistic photography in the mid-1950s and in 1958 became a member of the Hellenic Photographic Society. From then until the mid-1970s, photography became his passion and he devoted much of his free time to it. During his artistic career, his photographs were displayed in many exhibitions in Greece and abroad, and he received several awards. The International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP) awarded him the distinctions AFIAP (Artiste de la FIAP, Artist of the FIAP) and EFIAP (Excellence de la FIAP, Distinction of Excellence of the FIAP).
Raised in a conservative environment based mainly on healthy Christian morals, Dimitriadis embraced these values but at the same time maintained more open intellectual horizons, which allowed him to show interest in new trends in thought and art and to have the courage to try new techniques and perspectives in his photographic work. Both of these influences are clearly evident in his photographic work.
He died on November 17, 2010, in Athens. He was 93 years old. This was preceded by the death of his beloved wife, Kia, five years earlier.