Unique to Yeros’s vision is that his creative process is often like a poet’s. Certainly no contemporary photographer is more “poetic”.

John Wood, from the Introduction

An arresting fusion of poetry and visual art, Shades of Love takes its inspiration from one of Greece’s greatest writers: Constantine P. Cavafy.  Dimitris Yeros has produced nearly seventy photographic illustrations which bring out every nuance of Cavafy’s writing-with romance, intrigue, humor, despair and eroticism each playing a part.

Yeros has long admired Cavafy’s poems, calling him “the greatest Greek poet since antiquity”. The photographs in Shades of Love were taken over several years in which Yeros worked with models from a group of, as he puts it, “friends and acquaintances whose life or work was somehow connected with Cavafy”. Among Yeros’s models are prominent members of the artistic community such as Jeff Koons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gore Vidal, Tom Wesselmann and Clive Barker – these notable names springing from the idea to use “people from the world of letters and the arts…who knew and admired Cavafy’s poetry”. They are joined by a coterie of beautiful faces who represent the virility of youth – so often a theme in Cavafy’s work.

In addition to its visual richness, the book presents new English poetic translation of Cavafy by David Connolly. This complex collaboration assures  that Shades of Love explores the lines between light and dark, youth and age, seen and unseen – illuminating thems that this poet and photographer share.

Yeros says he is not sure what Cavafy would make of the photographs were he alive today, but Edward Albee (whose portrait also appears in the book) writes in his Foreword that he is “certain they would have pleased [him] greatly”.