By Claudia Moscovici

A self-taught artist of Greek origin born and raised in Melbourne Australia, photographer Bill Gekas is well-known around the world for his distinctive, Alice in Wonderland style that has won him numerous prestigious awards. In 2012, he received  Gold in the International Loupe Awards  and Silver in Le Prix de la Photographie in Paris.

His images usually feature a young girl of an unearthly cuteness in settings that sometimes take us back to different periods of art history and at other times carry us even further away, in fantastic and idiosyncratic realms of the imagination. This is why I drew the comparison between Bill Gekas’ images and Lewis Carroll’s popular tale.

Although “Alice in Wonderland” was published in 1865, it remains to this day one of the most beloved stories for both children and adults. The story has everything to please kids—colorful characters, an exciting, fancy-filled plot, plus lessons in life if you’re looking for them—and enough mental paradoxes, puzzles and symbolism to engage even the most brainy adults. Since Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a mathematician who incorporated elements of his field into the narrative, some have even identified non-Euclidean geometry in the Cheshire cat's disappearing body and residual grin.

Bill Gekas experiments through photography with finding complexity in a seemingly simple motif: the portrait of a young girl. Through countless variations on this theme, Gekas offers viewers fascinating slices of the history of art, including allusions to the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, to literary works, such as Alice in Wonderland. 

He pays enormous attention not only to conveying the rich and ever-changing expressions of the little girl, but also to capturing the texture, color and feel of the various settings. The vivid tableaux he creates featuring the same model are, arguably, far more diverse than if you considered the works of different artists working in the same genre. Achieving this variety while working with the same subject takes enormous skill at the craft of photography and a very rich and ingenious imagination. Bill Gekas welcomes you to his fantastic photographic world on the website http://www.billgekas.com/.