For my most recent project Bittersweet Apple, I spent two years investigating the Greek-American Diaspora in Astoria, New York. This is a diverse setting that was once the center of Hellenism in North America. As a youngster, I resented being in Astoria during my first visit twenty-five-years ago, I often tried to find ways to escape and move back to Greece. Everything seemed foreign to me, even the people who shared my own heritage. I felt a powerful sense of disconnection, and an unspecified sense of anger. I missed my friends, my extended family, my neighborhood in Athens, everything. What I expected to be familiar during my first visit to the Stated was actually quite unfamiliar, regardless of the reminders of Greek culture that the area offered.
Niko J. Kallianiotis is a Greek photographer, based in the United States.
