Life in the Public Sector, through the lens of Michalis Patsouras

The Greek public sector has often been described in contradictions: indispensable yet exasperating, rigid yet deeply human. Rarely, however, has it been observed from the inside – until photographer Michalis Patsouras turned his lens on it.

Between 1993 and 2000, while employed as a technician at the Ministry of Commerce, Patsouras quietly recorded the rhythms of everyday life in its offices. His black-and-white series 7 a.m. – 3 p.m. captures crowded rooms stacked with files, battered desks and typewriters, but also fleeting moments of lightness: colleagues sharing sweets, stealing a dance, or pausing for a breath amid the bureaucracy.

In 2000, Patsouras resigned to follow photography full-time, leaving behind the security of the civil service. What he preserved through his camera is more than an archive of paper and routine; it is a portrait of a system both relied upon and resisted, and above all, of the people who animated it with humor, fatigue, and resilience.

The series remained unseen and unpublished for over two decades before being presented at the Photometria Festival (Ioannina, 2022) and at the Thessaloniki Photobiennale 2023. Now, Hyper Hypo publications brings Patsouras’s images to the world with the release of a richly printed, hardcover photo book whose beautifully rendered images capture all the grittiness and atmosphere of the original prints; serving as a visual document of an era that feels both recent and distant. The photos are accompanied by an essay from professor and curator of photography Hercules Papaioannou, which seeks to contextualize Patsouras’s photographic series, and his experience in general, into the infamous world of the Greek public sector.

Patsouras’s career since has spanned editorial, advertising, and long-form documentary projects, always grounded in an immediate and experiential eye. His work has been exhibited widely, awarded at Athens Photo World, and included in the MOMus – Museum of Photography collection.

With 7 a.m. – 3 p.m., he offers not nostalgia, but a testimony: to labor, to memory, and to the humanity hidden in the most ordinary hours of the day.