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Remembering Constantine Manos Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

4 January 2025

Greek-American photographer Constantine Manos has died at the age of 90.

Born in 1934, in Columbia, S.C. to Greek immigrant parents, Manos developed his love for photography in his early teens when, at age 13, he joined his school camera club.

In 1952, he read an article about Henri Cartier-Bresson when he was studying at the University of South Carolina which changed his life. He emulated his mentor, buying a Leica and using Ilford film to take his first serious photos, beginning "a lifelong search for beautiful and poetic images."

At 19, he became the official photographer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. His photographs of the orchestra led to his first published work, Portrait of a Symphony, in 1961.

While a student at the then-segregated university, Manos wrote and published anti-segregation editorials featuring several of his images of the Gullah Geechee, an African American community whose relative isolation off the coast of South Carolina helped preserve some of the culture and language of their enslaved West African ancestors.

He graduated in 1955 with a major in English lit, enlisted in the military where he served in Germany as a staff photographer with the Stars & Stripes for two years.

He then moved to New York City where he worked for a variety of magazines including Esquire, Life and Look.

From 1961 to 1964, he lived in Greece where he photographed the people and landscapes. A Greek Portfolio was published in 1972, winning awards at Arles and the Leipzig book fair. Manos joined Magnum Photos in 1963, becoming a full member in 1965.

Manos moved to Boston where he was hired to create the photographs for the Where's Boston? exhibition, celebrating Boston's 200th anniversary. Those images became the book Bostonians: Photographs from Where's Boston?

In 1995, American Color was published, showcasing his more recent photographs of the American people. A Greek Portfolio was reissued in 1999, followed by a major exhibition of his work at the Benaki Museum in Athens. In 2003, Manos was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for his American Color photographs.

Recently, Manos stopped making new photographs and teaching workshops, but hundreds of images from the American Color series, all of them printed by Manos himself, remain unseen in his studio.

Manos is survived by his husband, Michael Prodanou, of 61 years; his sister, Irene Constantinides of Atlanta; his brother, Theofanis Manos of Greenville, S.C.; as well as three nephews and a niece.


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