Nikos Economopoulos: The Irrational Eye of the Balkans
by Jerome D.
Introduction
Nikos Economopoulos (b. 1953, Kalamata, Peloponnese, Greece) is one of the most significant documentary photographers working in Europe today — a full member of Magnum Photos since 1994, and the pre-eminent Greek photographer of his generation.
His path to photography was indirect and unhurried. He studied law at university in Parma, Italy, and worked as a journalist for years before a chance encounter with a book of photographs changed everything. In 1977, at 23, a friend showed him a volume of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work. The effect was immediate and permanent: "Cartier-Bresson showed me a new way to see things. What I saw in his work was not only geometry and composition, but a kind of ambiguity."
Even then, he did not rush. He spent two more years reading photography books before raising a camera. When he started shooting, he did it seriously from the first day: "I never photographed sunrises or made souvenir pictures of my children. For about eight or nine years I photographed at weekends and during my holidays, always in a serious way, working from morning to night."
In 1988, he quit journalism and set off alone — by car, camper, and motorcycle — on a two-year survey of Greece and Turkey. That journey became the foundation of his photographic identity. He joined Magnum as an associate in 1990, encouraged by the Greek-American photographer Costa Manos, and became a full member in 1994 after completing his defining Balkans project.
His other major influences alongside Cartier-Bresson are Sergio Larrain, Josef Koudelka — with whom he became close friends after a chance encounter in a village in northern Greece — and the Montenegrin writer Branimir Scepanovic.
His awards include the Mother Jones Award for Documentary Photography (1992) and the Abdi Ipektci Award for peace and friendship between Greek and Turkish people (2001). His retrospective, Economopoulos, Photographer, was exhibited at the Benaki Museum in Athens in 2005. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Méditerranéen de la Photographie in Corsica and the Benaki Museum.
He currently lives in Athens and runs the On The Road workshop programme, leading photography trips across Turkey, Greece, South America, Africa, and beyond.
Camera Gear Used by Nikos Economopoulos
Economopoulos's gear philosophy is one of the most clearly and consistently stated in photography. His own words, confirmed across a Leica Camera US interview, a Head On Photo Festival profile, a LuganoPhotoDays interview, and multiple other sources, leave no ambiguity: he has used Leica M cameras exclusively for his entire career, with a single 35mm lens, and currently uses nothing else.
As he told Leica Camera US directly: "I started using a Leica M3 with a 50mm lens, clearly influenced by what Cartier-Bresson was using, and I have had a Leica ever since. Over the last decade in fact I don't use anything else."
And more forcefully: "Now I have been using a Leica for so long that I cannot imagine my photographic life without it. I don't like changing my tools much. Often I feel terrified by the big fancy cameras. I find the simplicity of Leica very creative. It has the perfect balance that a creative tool needs."
Cameras
Leica M3 — His first Leica, used when he began serious photography in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Confirmed by his own statement to Leica Camera US: "I started using a Leica M3 with a 50mm lens, clearly influenced by what Cartier-Bresson was using." The M3, with its superb viewfinder magnification optimised for 50mm and longer lenses, was the camera Cartier-Bresson himself used for much of his career — an entirely deliberate choice of influence.
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| Leica M3 |
Leica M4 — Confirmed as his primary working camera during his early career in Greece and Turkey. He has stated: "I used an M4 Leica with 35mm lens, the perfect combination." The M4 was the camera with which he photographed Greece and Turkey from 1988 onwards, and the Balkans work that made his name in the early 1990s.
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| Leica M4 |
Leica M9 — His transition camera from film to digital, and simultaneously from black-and-white to colour. He has confirmed this directly: "Ten years ago, I changed my idea of photography completely. I'd never done colour before, it was too complicated. Then I bought a digital Leica M9, and moved to colour." He switched to the M9 specifically because it allowed him to move to colour while retaining the familiar Leica rangefinder body and M-mount lenses — no disruption to his working method, only to the palette.
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| Leica M9 |
Leica M10 — His current confirmed camera, stated in his Head On Photo Festival profile: "Now he's using an M10 with the 35mm Summicron. No other lenses, always the 35mm." The M10 is the most discreet full-frame digital Leica M, with a slim body profile closest to the classical film M dimensions — exactly the kind of simplicity Economopoulos values.
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| Leica M10 check price on Amazon |
Lenses
Leica Summicron-M 35mm f/2 — His sole lens for his entire mature career, confirmed explicitly and repeatedly. The Head On profile states unambiguously: "No other lenses, always the 35mm." He has also said: "I use a Leica M10 with a 35mm Summicron. I do believe that it is necessary to simplify things in order to think less on the technique and more on what interests us seriously, which is what we find inside the viewfinder."
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| Leica Summicron f/2 check price on Amazon |
His early M3 years used a 50mm lens in conscious imitation of Cartier-Bresson, but he moved to 35mm — also confirmed as Cartier-Bresson's preference for his most celebrated work — and has not deviated since. The 35mm suits the layered, environmental quality of his street work, where the relationship between foreground figures and background context is always part of the image.
Technique & Style
Nikos Economopoulos describes his approach as irrational — and means it as a compliment. His photographs are not the product of premeditation or technical calculation. They emerge from a quality of attention that is simultaneously relaxed and extremely acute, producing images that feel both spontaneous and slightly impossible: strange juxtapositions, ambiguous geometries, moments that seem to belong to a world operating by its own rules.
For the first three decades of his career, he worked exclusively in black-and-white, which he associated with certainty and mastery. The shift to colour was deliberate and almost self-disruptive: "With black-and-white, I was sure of what I was doing. It was easy for me to produce good pictures. So, I decided I needed something else, something new. To put some colour in my life. Just the emotion of doing something else. And maybe make mistakes and try to correct them."
His geographic focus is equally deliberate. He has consistently stated a preference for southern Europe and western Asia — the world of Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean — over international wandering: "I prefer to spend my time in this corner of the world, where I understand the codes and can make connections." His famous resistance to Japan — where he shot an assignment in the late 1990s and felt estranged for three full weeks — illustrates the point: his photography depends on a quality of cultural intuition that can only come from deep familiarity.
He is drawn to what he calls "the crossing of thresholds" — border zones, shared spaces, moments of exchange — and to the emotional texture of lives lived in public. The Roma communities, the Balkan peasants, the Cypriot inhabitants of the Green Line, the Kosovo refugees: all share a quality of existing at the margins of official histories, in spaces where the unexpected can still happen.
His composition is shaped by a willingness to embrace the "wrong" picture. He has described waiting to exclude a dog's face from a frame specifically because including it conventionally would have made the image predictable: "It's not the correct place to put a dog, but if you put the dog in the middle, it becomes very conventional. And it's this small or big mistake that makes me excited."
How to Imitate His Style in Post-Processing
Economopoulos's mature digital work in colour on the Leica M9 and M10 has a specific character: vivid but not over-saturated, with strong tonal contrast and a film-like rendering of colour temperature. His black-and-white film work is dense and rich, with deep shadows and carefully held highlight detail. Pixlr is an excellent tool for approaching both aesthetics:
For his colour work:
The Leica M9 and M10 sensors render colour with a specific warmth and density — particularly in skin tones and architectural surfaces. In Pixlr, use the White Balance tool to add a slight warm shift, then use Curves to deepen the midtones without crushing the shadows. The goal is colour that feels observed rather than processed.
For his black-and-white work:
Economopoulos's monochrome has weight — deep, rich blacks with a silver quality in the highlights. In Pixlr's Black & White converter, emphasise the contrast between light and dark tonal zones using the Luminance sliders, and add a very slight warm tone to the highlights to replicate the character of his fibre-based darkroom prints.
Never over-sharpen.
The Leica Summicron 35mm has a particular optical rendering — very sharp in the centre, with a slightly softer quality toward the edges and a smooth bokeh transition. Apply output sharpening conservatively in Pixlr, only enough to compensate for screen viewing. The image should feel present, not hyper-detailed.
Resist cropping.
Economopoulos composes meticulously in the viewfinder. The placement of elements at the edges of his frames is deliberate — including things that other photographers would exclude. Leave the full frame intact.
How to Shoot Like Nikos Economopoulos
Trust the irrational.
Economopoulos's most celebrated images are ones that surprised even him. He does not photograph what he expects to find. He photographs what unexpectedly stops him — and he has trained himself, over decades, to recognise those moments before his conscious mind can dismiss them. "Try to be free and to cultivate freedom, and trust your instinct, nurture it, go towards what gives you joy."
Radically simplify your kit.
One camera, one lens. For forty years. The Leica M and 35mm Summicron is not a starting point for Economopoulos — it is the entire toolkit. Simplification is not a constraint; it is the condition of freedom. When there are no equipment decisions to make, all cognitive resources go to seeing.
Develop your cultural intuition.
His strongest work comes from places he understands deeply — where he reads the codes, anticipates the rhythms, and feels the emotional register of daily life. Spend time in places that resonate with you culturally before photographing them seriously. Estrangement produces observation; familiarity produces participation.
Work the edges of the frame.
Look at where he places things near the borders of his images. Elements that conventional composition would centre or exclude entirely appear at the margins, creating a quality of incompleteness and surprise. Practice placing key elements off-centre and near the edges — and resist the instinct to clean up what appears at the frame's periphery.
Embrace the colour shift late.
Economopoulos spent thirty years in black-and-white before deliberately moving to colour as a form of self-challenge and renewal. Mastering one mode before moving to another — rather than defaulting to colour because it requires less deliberate thought — produces a more considered relationship with palette.
Teach and travel.
His On The Road workshops are not a sideline — they are part of his photographic practice. He has described the act of sharing photography with others as inseparable from the quality of attention he brings to his own work. Teaching forces you to articulate what you know intuitively, which deepens it.
Legacy
Nikos Economopoulos's contribution to European documentary photography is difficult to overstate. His Balkans work — made in Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, and Greece across the early 1990s, as those societies were undergoing some of the most turbulent transformations of the late twentieth century — produced a visual record of "Balkan Man" that was neither romanticising nor politicising, but simply present: curious, empathetic, and formally exacting.
His long-term focus on the Roma and other marginalised communities in Greece and across southeastern Europe brought sustained documentary attention to subjects that mainstream photojournalism consistently ignored. His Cyprus work on the Green Line, and his documentation of Albanian migrants crossing into Greece, contributed to a body of work about borders and displacement that anticipated the migration crises of subsequent decades.
At over 70, he continues to work, teach, and travel at the same pace — running workshops across four continents as part of On The Road, photographing with the same Leica M and 35mm Summicron he has carried for decades, and building an Instagram following of over 65,000 people, the majority of whom are aged 25-34. The fact that a photographer whose practice is rooted in the pre-digital Mediterranean world resonates so strongly with young international audiences says something important about the enduring appeal of work that prioritises human emotion over technical spectacle.
As he has said himself: "The element that's too often missing in contemporary photography is human emotion."
Books by Nikos Economopoulos
In the Balkans (1995, Abrams, New York) — His defining work. A decade of photographs documenting life across Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, made during the turbulent years following the fall of communism. Published simultaneously in Athens by Libro.
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| see it on Amazon |
Economopoulos, Photographer (2002) — His retrospective monograph, covering twenty-five years of work from Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, Cyprus, Kosovo, and beyond. Exhibited at the Benaki Museum, Athens in 2005.
Conclusion
Nikos Economopoulos has used Leica M cameras with a single 35mm Summicron lens for his entire career — from the M3 that started it all in conscious homage to Cartier-Bresson, through the M4 of his Balkans years, the M9 that made him a colour photographer, to the M10 he carries today.
His kit has not changed in its essential character for over forty years. What has changed is the depth of vision that comes from that accumulated simplicity — a visual intelligence so thoroughly integrated that the equipment has become invisible, and only the world remains.
"I find the simplicity of Leica very creative. It has the perfect balance that a creative tool needs."
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