Grigoris Digas - Borders

A ten-year wandering along the geographical edges of Greece — a systematic photographic documentation of the country’s contemporary border landscape.

Greek photographer Grigoris Digas presents Borders, a comprehensive ten-year photographic documentation of Greece’s land and maritime frontiers that challenges conventional narratives of national boundaries. Spanning 328 pages and featuring 211 images, the project explores Greece’s unknown border landscapes — restricted zones and frontier areas shaped by the very existence of borders.

The border space is not merely geographical, but psychological and political. Borders are places where memory and the enforcement of power coexist: sites marked by past struggles and disputes, yet still defined by control, surveillance, and the assertion of sovereignty. Each frontier bears its own distinct character, formed by geography, history, and ideology. In Borders, every image captures this dual condition — the echo of history and the tangible or intangible presence of authority — revealing the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of boundaries.

In today’s global context, borders are once again being reinforced as strategies to manage migration, control movement, and respond to crises. Yet through his artistic approach, Digas resists presenting borders as fixed lines, choosing instead to photograph them as dynamic, living landscapes. In Borders, he reexamines the very notion of boundaries, inviting reflection on how these politically constructed lines shape our collective understanding of identity and otherness — and quietly reminding us that no border has ever lasted forever.

As articulated in one of the book’s essays:“In these pages, we do not encounter the border, but a multitude of borderings—captured not as singular truth, but as splinters of experience, moments that resist easy seeing and clear categorisation. A border that is not one, but many. Not fixed, but perpetually shifting.”

-Excerpt from the essay Spectres of the Border by Paschalina Garidou & Henk van Houtum

About the artist

Grigoris Digas is a research-based photographer, born and based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a PhD from the University of Brighton (2020) and an MFA in Photography (2012) from the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. His work explores notions of boundaries, displacement, and exile within political and cultural contexts. Through long-form visual research, he creates narratives that are both personal and analytical—grounded in lived experience while informed by theory and research. He primarily works on long-term projects realised in book form.

Digas’s work has been exhibited at festivals and institutions internationally. He has self-published two handmade, limited-edition photobooks, and has been awarded the Birgit Skiold Memorial Trust Prize (2012) and the PMI2 Award from the British Council (2011). His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, the Municipal Art Gallery of Thessaloniki, and the Artist Books Collection of UCA.