He is a photographer who has always been persecuted because of his ideology in the difficult years that followed the Greek civil war, so it is almost impossible for him to do his job properly.
Nonetheless, Stelios Kasimatis always managed to take pictures of the weaker classes of the population (laborers, peasants, women, children), to record the difficult conditions of work, living, education and health and, in indeed, always with such quality that stood out from the current view in photojournalism.
Stelios Kasimatis was born in 1920 in Piraeus and graduated from the department of engineers in the school “Association of Piraeus”. He is hired in the government-owned factory of planes, a job that he leaves in the time of German-Italian Occupation because he does not want to work for the conqueror. Intensely politicised, he participates in the resistance in sabotages against the enemy and becomes captain of ELAS. (he infiltrated into the National Liberation Front and the National Resistance Movement)
In the next years he follows the fate of thousands of resistance fighters and in 1946 he is found banished in the island Ikaria.
He begins to photograph systematically the life of the banished people there with enormous dangers.
He developed films and printed photographs secretly.
After Ikaria, follows the island Makronisos with continuous tortures.
He ends up to the mental institute at Dafni, from where he takes certificate of leave.
With a lot of difficulties he begins to photograph and opens a photographic shop in the centre of Athens.
He was exploiting light with mastery.
He collaborates with the newspaper AVGI.
His photographic glance is distinguished, he records the other Greece, not the one that the sovereign ideology wishes.
With a ROLLEIFLEX camera, he wandered for a long period and took shoots of people and their struggles for freedom and survival. He used to photograph kids and in the summertime he took photos of bathers at the beaches of Athens.
He records the Greece of the poor, the unemployed, the political prosecutions. Surely, the continuous pressures and his prosecutions deprived him of the possibility of a most completed photographic work, but he managed to maintain his integrity in difficult seasons.He photographed Melina Merkouri, Josephine Baker and many others.
He was also a keen philatelist and wrote many articles and studies for “Hellenic Philoteleia”.