Nikos Economopoulos

Nikos Economopoulos was born in the Peloponnese, Greece, in 1953. He studied law and worked as a journalist in Parma, Italy, before he began photographing in Greece and Turkey — and eventually abandoned journalism to dedicate himself to photography.

He joined Magnum Photos in 1990, and his photographs began appearing in newspapers and magazines around the world. In the same period he travelled and photographed extensively across the Balkans; that work won him the Mother Jones Award for work in progress, and on its completion in 1994 he became a full member of Magnum. His book In the Balkans was published in 1995 in New York and Athens.

Through the 1990s he worked on borders and crossings — the inhabitants of the "Green Line" in Cyprus, the irregular migrants on the Greek–Albanian borderline, and the mass migration of ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo — and photographed the Roma and other minorities. In 2000 he completed a book on the storytellers of the Aegean islands, and in 2002 a retrospective, Economopoulos, Photographer, was shown at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

He returned to Turkey for a long-term personal project, receiving the Abdi İpekçi award for peace and friendship between the Greek and Turkish peoples. In recent years he has turned to colour. Today he spends most of his time away from Greece — travelling, teaching and photographing around the world through his long-running On the Road project.