Robert McCabe: Witness to a changing country

Robert McCabe has witnessed many of the changes that Greece has experienced over the past 60 years. The acclaimed American photographer first arrived in this country in the mid-1950s with a Rolleiflex hanging on a strap around his neck, on a 10-day trip that proved so instrumental that he still shares his time between New York, Athens and the Greek island of Patmos. His early shots of Greece provide an opportunity to assess the past and ponder where we are headed.

It comes as little surprise, therefore, that Museum of Cycladic Art director Nicholas Stampolidis decided to include a section on McCabe's photographs in "Cycladic Society 5,000 Years Ago," an exhibition which opened in early December. Where McCabe's photographs fit into this narrative is to illustrate how life on the Greek islands in the 1950s and 60s was not that much different to the way it was thousands of years...