Parthena Manoussakis

I move through cities as both witness and participant, using film photography to study the quiet language of faces. Portraiture, to me, is less about documentation and more about preservation of mood, time, and the subtle negotiations people make with the world around them. Working across different countries and cultures has reinforced a shared interiority that transcends geography. My practice is an ongoing attempt to honour that universality, while respecting the specificity of each individual I photograph.
Test Project

Project A
Project B
Project C
Project D
Project E
Project F
Project G

Email tinamanoussakis@gmail.com
Instagram @tinamanoussakis
Project A

Archival pigment prints
Manoussakis / Domestic Archive
c. 2026Publication

ISBN: 0-4748-4976-7
240 × 360 mm
144 page Softcover

Drawers sit open like memory boxes. Framed photographs softened by time, rosary beads pooled together, costume jewellery kept not for value but for history. Combs, perfume bottles, soap, and everyday objects still wrapped, arranged for continuity. 


Project B

Film 35mm
Manoussakis / Domestic Archive
c. 2025Publication

ISBN: 978-1-922947-18-4
240 × 360 mm
144 page Softcover

These images reveal a home curated by ceremony and continuity. This interior functions as an extension beyond the material, moving into lineage, belief, and the ineffable. In a time when nostalgia is so thick, these households remind us of our capacity for endurance and care. It stands as a record of resilience, sustained by instinct rather than sentiment. Nothing here exists ornamentally. Objects honour the dead, host the living, mark time. Hospitality becomes reverence, memory is sustained through repetition, and love is expressed in readiness. 

Project C

Film 80mm
Tokyo / Japan 
April 29Publication

ISBN: 0-1835-3755-6
246 x 292 mm
520 page Softcover

Project B is a measured inquiry into the rhythm and flux of Tokyo’s Shibuya district, captured in autumn. Each frame operates as a discrete entry in a cinematic codex, where still photography meets narrative reflection. The work examines transience, movement, and the orchestrated chaos of urban life, constructing a visual essay that is at once observational and intimate. It seeks to hold the ephemeral in place, rendering the fleeting momentarily substantial, and to consider the city as both lived experience and perceptual construct.


Project C

Brooklyn, NY
718/347/929, 917
September  Publication

ISBN: 0-3277-9859-9
246 x 292 mm
522 pp. Hardcover

Brooklyn reveals itself through overlapping rhythms: the West Indian Day Parade, where procession becomes a living archive of diasporic memory, and The Lot Radio, where bodies gather in the rain, uncontained and unremarked. Set on a small triangular parcel of land, the open-air station operates as a social instrument. Here, music structures time, the everyday becomes ritual, and collective presence temporarily coheres. These scenes hold a city in the act of becoming, where movement gathers weight, and belonging emerges through rhythm, sound, and collective presence. 


Project D

French Soirée 
Ember / Venusian
May 9Publication

ISBN: 0-7479-5270-1
235 x 324mm
160 pp. Softcover

Project A unfolds as an exercise in quiet seduction. Between the wine and the window, a spell is cast. The female host anchors the room through tempo, shaping the night with gesture and proximity. Desire circulates: unspoken yet unmistakable. Carried in posture, in pause, in linger. This is seduction as stewardship with cultivated pleasure. Power resides in containment, in knowing when to offer and when to withhold. The night unfolds on her terms, unhurried, tactile, inevitable.

Project E

Lorem Ipsum
Anglicus
2003Publication

ISBN: 0-7449-4575-5
216 x 254 mm
140 pp. Hardcover

This collection moves through New York in summer, when the city loosens its grip just enough to let people show themselves. Nothing is staged. Intimacy happens in passing. To get lost here isn’t collapse, it’s calibration. You walk without explanation, sometimes alone but never isolated, carried by the momentum of other lives playing out beside yours. Power comes from that anonymity, the freedom to be unfinished, to be desirous, to be entirely yourself without performance. New York doesn’t romanticise you, it sharpens you. These brief and physical moments are what make the city seductive, give it its charge and hold us inside it.
Project F

Help Me Not Die
Experimental/ThrillerScreening

Como Cinema / Double Premiere 
Festival circuit submission, 2025

An experimental meditation on intimacy and psychological endurance, Help Me Not Die follows the volatile orbit between a couple and an intruding third presence. Darkly absurd yet emotionally exacting, the film resists narrative comfort, instead inviting the viewer into a space of tension, exposure, and raw interiority. Witnessing the work in a full cinema underscored the performers’ striking vulnerability and charged chemistry a reminder that cinema, at its most potent, is not watched but felt.
1/2 Ipsum Voluptate, Nostrum

Project G

Orthodox Easter
Private gathering, Autumn 
Experimental/ThrillerPublication

Ritual / Domestic Archive / Photo Essay
70mm, 2025

Greek Easter is a controlled rupture. Its infrastructure of inheritance is maintained through correction, discipline, and labour. The domestic space becomes a site of endurance where intimacy is unavoidable, and memory cannot be curated. Resurrection, in this context, is not transcendence. It is return. To appetite. To excess. To the table as a battleground and refuge. These images do not mourn the past, they document a system that persists through contradiction and tradition. A ritual that does not comfort, but sustains.


Parthena Manoussakis Diary