Daniel Adhami’s love letter to Crete’s roadside shrines

Daniel Adhami’s first-ever publication, Icon Stations, is a photographic index of weathered, sacred, and quietly commemorative Greek wayside shrines. The London-born Russian-Iranian photographer graduated from King’s College London in 2019 with a Neuroscience degree and now works professionally as a fashion and portrait photographer. Four years of exploring Crete and 900 photographs later, Adhami has carefully collated a publication that moves away from photographing people to document Crete’s sacred structures.

Dotted mainly along coastal paths or particularly treacherous mountain roads, wayside shrines – eikonostasi in Greek – are honorific structures which either mark a victim’s gratitude towards a certain saint for escaping a near-fatal accident or commemorate a life lost. Adhami’s book, published by Reference Press captures the spectrum of these structures, sometimes colourfully adorned with coins and flowers, sometimes sombre and bare on Crete’s landscape.

Why icon stations? 

There’s an aspect of photography for me that has always been about gathering:  the collection of things through taking photographs. By presenting many of one thing in a series you expand the realm of how that thing can be seen or understood. It’s the relationship between images, rather than the individual images themselves that gives shape to this work.

Icon Stations began as an act of collection on the island of Crete five years ago.  The 300 three hundred icon stands featured in this book are a selection of almost  900 photographed over those five years. They are found across the island and wider Greece: sacred structures made of plaster, stone, metal or concrete that contain painted icons dedicated to a particular patron saint, along with coins, oil lamps and lighters.

They serve as pillars of local memory within a wider network of religious structures dotted around the island’s wild, mountainous terrain and its villages and coastlines. Eikonostasia in Greek translates as ‘icon stand’ or ‘icon station’. The title of this book presents icon stands as individual stations along a journey, but also as points of refuge or access.

As I spent more time within it, learning about these structures and discovering new ones on every trip, it felt important to archive it in some way.

Why Crete? 

Icon stands can be found all over Greece, and similar structures across the  Eastern Orthodox world. If you cast the net wider, you’ll find wayside shrines in multiple forms across many continents. Humankind has found it important to mark and signify its physical environment with symbols.

I found myself in Crete by coincidence. I’d returned to the island over the years – there’s something about the landscape, the sheer scale of it, the history, that always draws me in. The island has been conquered and occupied by foreign powers – Romans, Arabs, Venetians and Ottoman Turks – taxing, administrating and to different degrees, repressing the local population and in turn Hellenic Christian Orthodoxy. It’s partly this history, along with the dislocated terrain of the island, that has made its visible landmarks so important. Icon stands represent people’s hold on their land. Whether built to commemorate a life lost,  to protect a village from bad omens or to signpost the location of remote villages in the mountain plains, these structures are important in maintaining memory and identity, in a land with much to be remembered.

Why black and white?

Standardisation. First and foremost, the book is a typological study: a visual index tracing the wide breadth of an exceptional folk art phenomenon across the island.  Over the project, I used the same black and white film – it was an instinctive choice at the start, but one that made sense. By presenting them in black and white, the aesthetic range of the series was reduced to make the physical attributes between the icon stands more immediate.

Why Reference Press? 

Ever since Reference Point – a library, bookshop and bar – opened three years ago it has been a place of communion for me and many artists in London. A word often thrown around quite liberally today, but Reference Point serves as a true community space for the visual arts in a city that has starved itself of these spaces in recent decades. I can’t overstate how important it’s been to have a space in which conversation, visual research and collaboration occur so organically. The project was in its early days when I first discussed it with the team at Reference Point, unsure of how this project would best exist in the world. After numerous conversations and a few more years of collecting, it was clear that the project would best suit the format of a book. At that moment, they were launching their publishing imprint, Reference Press. As the team were so intimately involved with the project from the beginning, the work was commissioned as their first publication.

Why now?

This book is an attempt at an archive, an incomplete and mobile archive of sorts,  representing only a fraction of what can be found across the island. The slow tide of individualism and secularisation has seen icon stands evolve from community-built and maintained structures to mass-produced and prefabricated types. Their oil lamps, although still flickering in the countryside and along roads, are slowly being phased out by plug-in electric models found in garden centres around the island. Some of the earliest icon stands, built on mule tracks deep within the island’s gorges, are now bypassed by asphalt roads and forgotten or left in disrepair. It was important for me that this phenomenon was recorded, at this point in time.