From the postwar period through the late twentieth century, Australian documentary photographers turned their cameras toward everyday life: workplaces, streets, and domestic interiors. These images did not simply record social groups. They shaped collective understandings of Anglo-Australian identity, Indigenous presence, and migrant experience, participating in an ongoing negotiation of who Australians were and might become.
Today, this function has receded from art. Mass media and digital platforms now shape the images of the collective self. The critical force that once animated documentary practice survives in diluted form: as style, atmosphere, and symbolic reference. Critique is not abolished but absorbed. Its languages are retained while their force is neutralised, redeployed as signs of cultural awareness rather than as sustained questioning. What once unsettled dominant narratives now serves as branding. Its smile remains charming. The bite is gone.
Contemporary art is more conceptually sophisticated and institutionally visible than ever. It no longer functions as a stage for the symbolic contests of class, gender, and ideology, nor as a mirror in which their settlements and unresolved tensions are collectively recognised. It operates as striking or even provocative display, consumed within galleries and specialist circuits, rarely crossing into broader social life. Art retains its complexity. It has, however, lost some of its social traction as a shared reflective practice.
This is not because art failed to represent those historically excluded but because the mirror itself has been relocated. Australians increasingly encounter themselves through suburban shopping centres and online platforms that privilege speed, repetition, and immediacy over duration. Sustained attention, once central to forming and questioning collective identity, gives way to recognition that demands little. The collective mirror has not vanished. It has fragmented into retail glass and screen surfaces scattered across the continent.
In this context, The Heart of Giving emerges not simply as a document of community, but as a negotiation with the conditions under which community becomes visible at all. The photographs do not resolve this tension; they sustain it. They move between proximity and distance, between presence and framing, holding the viewer in a position that is neither fully inside nor comfortably outside. In this sense, the work resists the expectation that photography can make care transparent. Instead, it marks the limits of what can be shown, and the structures that determine how it is seen.
Community and the Ethics of Representation
Over the past two decades, however, Australian documentary photography has moved away from this trend toward more reflexive engagement with the conditions of representation. Rather than assume community as a pre-formed social body whose identity is already settled and awaiting depiction, recent practices foreground questions of relationality, vulnerability, and responsibility. They ask how communities come into being through acts of representation and what ethical obligations such acts entail.
The Heart of Giving participates in this broader ethical reorientation. While Effy Alexakis’s earlier work with the Greek-Australian community provided documentary visibility and archival recovery, this project turns attention toward the conditions under which community becomes recognisable. Rather than begin from a collective identity determined in advance, the work starts from a singular figure, Father Nektarios, allowing community to emerge through the ethical gravity of everyday acts of care.
Her introduction states this commitment explicitly: “As a documentary photographer, my intent is to engage the everyday and to seek, explore, reflect, consider, unravel, highlight and embrace what is seen and initially hidden.”
Yet the photographs immediately complicate this declaration. The introduction’s final photograph shows people in the courtyard from a distance, faces not visible, privacy protected. Two years pass between these early images and photographs such as Girl with “new” coat, where a proximity has been earned through a sustained relationship. Engagement, as the work proceeds, requires caution.
These two imperatives, engagement and caution, operate as framing conditions. Neither inside the photographs as content nor outside as mere context, they constitute the frame through which the work becomes possible, operating in the tension between documentary protocols and ethical obligations and between the intent to reveal and the imperative to protect. The work proceeds within this tension rather than resolving it.
Exposure and the Structure of Community
The project is framed across three distinct fields: the priest’s everyday life, the volunteers, and the persons in need. Although these figures together constitute a community, the work avoids presenting them as a unified social body. To bring these positions into single visual synthesis would risk simplification and conceal the asymmetries of power that structure their relations.
Authority, vulnerability, responsibility, and dependence do not circulate evenly across these positions. The work holds these differences apart rather than reconciling them. What appears is a constellation of unequal relations: partially opaque, resistant to totalisation, ethically unfinished.
This is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls exposure. For Nancy, community is not a form to be represented or a unity to be achieved but the condition of being exposed to others without the guarantee of reconciliation. It exists where singular beings appear together without being subsumed into common essence. The refusal to resolve priest, volunteers, and people in need into a single coherent image is itself an enactment of Nancy’s insight: community cannot be faced directly, only approached through the gaps, the asymmetries, the relations that resist closure. What might appear as failure to visualise unity is in fact a fidelity to community’s exposed character.
Before the photographs themselves appear, the book tests the limits of openness rather than the integrity of boundaries. It signals this concern from the outset. The volume includes an introduction by the photographer, a cultural analysis of Newtown, interviews with priests, volunteers, and visitors, official documents, and historical photographs drawn from Father Nektarios’s archive. It opens with a photograph of the Archbishop of Australia alongside a facsimile reproduction of an official document, complete with protocol number and the seals of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia.
This framing is significant. The work seeks a reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject, consistently photographing people on their own terms. Yet it does not presume that ethical intention alone can suspend existing structures of authority. Nor does Father Nektarios’s genuine compassion allow the framework to dissolve into purely informal or unregulated moral economy. The photographer acknowledges that meaning is governed by pre-existing structures, that what becomes visible is regulated rather than neutral. Alexakis’ working strategy is not a retreat from engagement but an understanding that openness itself is conditioned, framed, and unevenly distributed.
Lives, Images, and the Ethics of Looking
The opening photograph depicts the façade of the church and its adjoining hall as seen from King Street. What follows, however, is not a mute or closed building. The image invites a slow visual exploration: the details of the entrance, the columns, the architectural rhythm of the façade. Significantly, this image is placed before the portrait of Father Nektarios.
The architectural complex is presented as sharply separate from its surroundings. Something happens here that does not happen on the street or in the ordinary flow of the city. A metal fence creates horizontal stratification between public street space and interior, yet the church’s exterior colours and classical columns suggest a cultural osmosis created by hesitant acceptance and adaptation. The Greek Orthodox presence is not asserted through the figure of the postwar economic migrant but through architectural negotiation. The building translates British neoclassicism into an Australian vernacular. This is the church and large hall of Saints Constantine and Helen, a Greek Orthodox complex in Newtown, a sanctuary within the harshness of daily life.
For the photographer, the church functions simultaneously as the threshold and obstacle, something that must be crossed to reach the project’s core. It marks passage into a documentary undertaking: a study of people, a book, a body of images. The photographs remain, to a degree, sheltered from the pressures that condition the space. They refuse to be fully absorbed by official order and insist instead on articulating their own form of truth.
The introduction includes the first photographs, functioning both as condensation of what will follow and as a guide to how the project will unfold. A portrait of Father Nektarios establishes a singular figure from which this community emerges. Kitchen scenes follow: the priest and volunteers with their backs to the camera, stirring pots. Women prepare food, hands engaged in labour. The final image in this sequence shows people in the courtyard, photographed from distance. Their faces are not clearly visible. Their privacy is protected. What happens in this space is suggested but not exposed.
These images signal from the outset that the photographer herself will not remain unchanged, that seeing is not a fixed capacity but develops through encounter. This understanding becomes explicit near the end of the project in Girl with “new” coat, where the accompanying text foregrounds the process rather than the event. The photographer emphasises the transience of many encounters and describes her own gradual movement toward ease: “over the time I am more comfortable with them and they with me.” What the image registers is not an instantaneous extraction but the provisional outcome of a relationship that unfolds unevenly over time.
The photograph is not the origin of the encounter but its temporary crystallisation. The text clarifies the conditions of its reception, making explicit the ethical and temporal circumstances under which it was produced. Visibility is negotiated, delayed, revisable.
Before the soup kitchen photographs begin, the introduction includes historical and biographical framing. A double-page spread shows the priest officiating a memorial service for the first Greek who arrived in Australia, buried in Camperdown Cemetery. The image introduces historical depth that is then expanded through Father Nektarios’s own narrative of his life, accompanied by archival photographs from his personal collection. If a photograph, as Barthes wrote, is a clock for seeing time, then here one can hear the old clock ticking beneath the new.
Lives Within the Frame
Alexakis captures the complexity of the community not only through who she photographs but through how she frames them. Throughout the project, she pays careful attention to the environments her subjects inhabit, to the objects and inscriptions that surround them, and to the architectural contexts that condition their presence.
The photograph of Maria, the Greek language teacher, demonstrates Alexakis’ method with particular clarity. She sits at a white table in what appears to be a classroom in a back room, auxiliary to the main spaces of worship and food service. Behind her, handwritten Greek text covers the upper portion of the wall. It is a prayer from post-Civil War Greece that generated the mass migration to suburbs like Newtown. To her left hangs a framed devotional image. To her right, a blank whiteboard. She does not face the camera directly. Her gaze is turned to her right, away from the lens, and there is something in her expression that suggests she is elsewhere. Her hands are clasped on the table.
Through this careful framing and attention to environment, Alexakis reveals someone who exists across different historical registers simultaneously. The image condenses these moments into a single frame, even as the details allow them to unfold again.
Maria came to Australia in 1963, married to Nikolaos who had arrived from Sparta in 1954. Her dream was to be a teacher, but she could not find work when she first arrived. She has been with the Greek afternoon school at Saints Constantine and Helen since circa 1969, teaching high school students when 450 children attended lessons every day and on Saturdays. Now she has ten. At the time Alexakis made this portrait, Maria’s husband was in hospital. “I come here to forget,” she says. “I don’t like to be alone at home. These children give me the strength to continue.”
The Greek text behind her raises its own questions. Handwritten, preserved but no longer actively produced, it speaks from a world of devastation and displacement. The classroom it inhabits tells a different story: from 450 children to a handful, as the grandchildren of migrants find less reason to carry the language forward. Is this text simply a trace, a remnant? Or does something persist here, transmitted through her continued presence, through the ten children who still come? The blank whiteboard to her right does not resolve this. It remains open, suspended between what has been written and what might yet be inscribed.
Father Nektarios is recognisably central to this community. Every testimony in the book references him. Maria speaks of having “the best years with him.” Sheree describes him as “heart-warming and supportive,” someone whose departure will mean “a great loss.” Yet the work does not construct a portrait of a representative figure or singular hero.
Instead, we see his back, his hand covering his face, his body in motion downstairs. He appears to be stirring pots, working in kitchens, and moving through spaces. These formal choices prevent the viewer from fixing him as a monument or removing him from the relational network in which he exists. The woman watching him work, the young volunteer sharing kitchen space, the equipment surrounding him all remain present. He is shown within structures, relationships, and labour rather than elevated above them.
Although the work clearly delineates three fields—priest, volunteers, persons in need—this structural separation does not function as rigid taxonomy. Instead, it makes visible the network of power relations through which the soup kitchen operates while allowing the spaces between these positions to remain open. The approach functions here as an investigative tool: an attentiveness to what circulates across roles without collapsing them.
This becomes particularly evident in the photograph of Shulian. She stands in the centre of the church hall, facing the camera with a broad, open smile. Behind her, the space is fully visible: blue plastic chairs and tables arranged for meals, religious icons on the walls, a wooden bookshelf, a clock marking time. The caption notes that Shulian “appears to come to the soup kitchen on most days. She helps with all duties that need doing, sitting in quiet camaraderie with the other volunteer helpers. No-one asks her to do anything; she just does what is needed.” Shulian is from China and has been in Australia for eight years. The photographer could not understand her; Shulian wrote her name instead.
The caption reveals complexity that the image alone cannot resolve. Is she a volunteer? Someone who receives support? Both? Despite the language barrier, the photograph does not clarify, nor does it attempt to. What it shows is someone who inhabits this space regularly, who has found a role that requires no formal designation, who participates through quiet presence and labour.
Sheree is photographed in a different register entirely. She stands before an Orthodox icon case, its ornate metalwork and lit candles creating a warm, devotional atmosphere. She wears a grey Nike sweatshirt and large plaid scarf, her hair pulled back. No other figures appear. Her account moves across multiple temporalities. She lives in nearby Tempe with her partner and three children. “When I was a kid, I went to church, but it wasn’t till I grew up having kids and coming here that I started to really come to church a bit more.” What began as material need has become spiritual belonging, yet the material support continues. She is recipient and witness, someone who receives blessings and someone who wants to demonstrate gratitude.
These photographs enact what Ghassan Hage terms “multiple inhabitance”. Maria, Shulian and Sheree do not occupy positions “in between” roles. They occupy different social, historical, and affective positions simultaneously without resolution. Maria fulfils a lifelong dream even as that dream has radically diminished. Witness to a community’s dispersal, she maintains what remains. She comes to a classroom to teach and to forget, to preserve continuity and to find solace in loss. Shulian exists as a quiet helper whose labour sustains the community and as someone whose presence here likely depends on the support it provides. Sheree receives food and financial help while also participating in worship, raising her children within this community, and preparing to bear witness to what Father Nektarios has meant to them.
A Democratic Image Field
As mentioned earlier, the photographs are organised according to the subjects they depict, yet this organisation refuses hierarchical privileging. Alexakis does not ignore heightened or exemplary moments of life. A formal portrait of a Bishop in full ecclesiastical regalia appears late in the book, complete with religious iconography and official insignia. However, in what might be described as Alexakis’ democratic hierarchy, this moment is made to wait its turn, occupying the same visual space as portraits of elderly visitors, volunteers at work, people waiting in the hall. The Bishop’s portrait is not brought forward to the opening, not isolated from ordinary moments, not enlarged beyond the full-page treatment given to other subjects.
Instead, Alexakis orders the photographic material to allow multiple manifestations of life in the soup kitchen to remain present simultaneously, refusing to subordinate them to a single aesthetic logic. This approach is reinforced by the book’s layout. The soup kitchen section opens with fifteen photographs on a double-page spread immediately establishing a rhythm of accumulation rather than isolation. The images vary in size. Some larger, some smaller, yet no single moment dominates. People eating together, food being prepared, trays of meals, a musician with guitar, a child waving at the camera: all participate equally in constructing a sense of the soup kitchen’s life. Some subsequent pages, like the one with Father Nektarios holding a photograph of himself as a young soldier, are given over to single images. Others, like the pages showing Eirini serving food through the window and working at tables, contain multiple photographs of the same activity. The potato peelers section spreads eleven photographs across six pages, giving sustained attention to repetitive labour rather than isolating a single decisive moment.
As a result, not all images assert themselves with equal force, yet this variation in presence is not a hierarchy of importance. Images of service labour, food preparation, and people gathering appear alongside formal portraits without hierarchical subordination. The work accepts friction between documentation and aesthetic resolution rather than striving for seamless synthesis. Hesitation becomes a working principle: a refusal to allow aesthetic coherence to override the uneven, contingent texture of lived experience.
An Ethics of Looking
This approach demonstrates how the work avoids monumentalising the singular figure through back-turned views and gestures of vulnerability. Yet this refusal to monumentalise does not mean avoiding the frontal gaze entirely. Rather, it is deployed selectively, and when it is, the encounter is structured using Alexakis’ own method. This contrasts with photographers such as Diane Arbus. According to Susan Sontag, Arbus’ photography “advertises a world in which everybody is an alien,” assembling a visual catalogue of human otherness through an insistently frontal gaze that “stares down strangeness.”
In The Heart of Giving, a photograph of two men seated outdoors demonstrates the opposite logic. The men sit side by side on a bench, their bodies angled slightly toward the camera. Both wear shirts with the same patterns. Their hands are clasped in their laps in nearly identical gestures. The camera hovers just above eye level, producing a gentle downward tilt. This vantage point grants the photographer slight observational distance while avoiding the authority or dominance implied by a steep overhead view. The result is an ethics of looking that is attentive without being intrusive. The two men share striking external similarity in gesture, posture, and attire. Yet the photograph does not reduce them to their appearance or isolate their resemblance as spectacle. Their individuality emerges not despite this likeness but through it. Difference is not extracted from physical deviation but disclosed through relational positioning. Unlike Arbus’s strict frontality, which intensifies estrangement, the slight downward tilt here softens the encounter. The camera does not expose its subjects. It frames them gently, allowing the viewer to meet their gaze without either confrontation or subordination.
It is an approach in which understanding replaces shock.
In this sense, The Heart of Giving becomes not simply a documentary record but a form of ethical attention — a reminder that community persists through fragile acts of care in a world that often appears indifferent.
Yannis Dramitinos is a photographer based in Sydney. Currently, he is working on launching the first titles for a small-press publishing project, Editions 25°36′36″S, 134°21′17″E, forthcoming in 2026.
Effy Alexakis is a documentary photographer with over forty years of documenting the Greeks in Australia. She is currently digitising her vast archive, recently gifted to the State Library of NSW.
- For further information and to purchase The Heart of Giving by Effy Alexakis, see Photowrite.
