Constantine "Costa" Manos was an American photographer best known for his vivid images of Boston and Greece. A longtime member of Magnum Photos, he was born in Columbia, South Carolina, the son of Greek immigrants.
In 2002, I took one of his street photography workshops in Maine. His critiques were sharp, honest, and always insightful. At one session I showed him a slide I had made at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He looked at it a long time — something he did not often do — and said, "It's ok." To this day, I often find myself wondering what he would say about a photograph I've just taken. The workshop was humbling in the way that real instruction is humbling — someone showed me how little I was seeing.
What he showed me, specifically, was color. His photographs are bold and crisp, alive with saturated hues and deliberate composition. I had never encountered work quite like his, and after that week I couldn't look at a scene the same way.
In the preface to his 1995 book American Color — now out of print — Manos wrote:
My favorite pictures have always been complex ones which ask questions and pose problems, but leave the answers and solutions to the viewer. These are images with a long and evolving life, in which the photograph may transcend the subject and become the subject.
The photographs in American Color are uncaptioned. They don't need captions. They remind me that powerful images can be found close to home, and that beauty often emerges from the ordinary.