Years of storage lend nuance to collection of images

For Constantinos Pittas, a good photograph must elevate the prosaic to the preternatural, the banal to the magical.

Strolling one 1985 evening in Paris's Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as the gates were about to close, Pittas saw the otherwise commonplace spectacle of a couple sitting on a bench. Basking in a ray of dying light peeking through the trees at dusk, the pair appeared to be floating in space. Without a second thought, Pittas pressed the shutter button.

"I felt as if it was the first time I was really seeing a couple sitting on a bench," he says staring across the table at the photograph, now hanging on the wall of the French Institute in Athens (IFA). "It was like two units becoming one," he says.

More than 30 years since that day, Pittas, now 59, comfortably recalls the story behind nearly every photograph in his current exhibition, "Athenians &...