Born in London of Greek Cypriot parents, Georgiou graduated in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London.

Georgiou’s work has focussed on communities split between different cultures. After working for six years in Serbia, Greece and eastern Europe, he was recently based for four years in Istanbul. His work in Turkey led to a series of photographs titled Fault Lines/Turkey/East/West, which has led to several exhibitions and a book. Georgiou has also taught photography at Barnet College in London and a number of workshops in Europe.

Arriving somewhere new, Georgiou’s approach is first to unburden himself of pre-existing images of the place and to try to see through superficial differences with places he knows; he then looks for commonalities and actual differences. He starts by himself and only when well underway hopes to attract commissions and make sales.

Georgiou’s early work was in black-and-white but for Fault Lines and subsequent work he moved to colour, using a compact camera with an articulated LCD that may be viewed from above, like the ground glass screen of a twin-lens reflex camera; this is because he believes it less intimidating for the people photographed than a camera held to the eye.

Georgiou belongs to Pianos Pictures His non-commercial approach has presented challenges; speaking in 2009, he described himself as having large debts but remaining optimistic.

Last stop

‘In 2008 I returned to London having spent the last nine years living and working in Eastern Europe and Turkey and was surprised by the speed of change that had taken place. I wanted to document the city, its movements and migrations, its landscape and architecture, its diversity and energy. I wanted to understand how so many people from all over the world manage to share the same space.

The double-decker bus allows me to frame the city, to give it sense. The lower level is very close to the street, where I’m almost touching the people in the traditional form of street photography. The upper deck allows me the distance to capture the layers of the urban landscape. Between these two positions everything shifts, along with the movement of the bus.

I was also fascinated by how people use public space in a big city, by that sense of shared invisibility. In sitting behind the window, I also became invisible but the bus also gives you the privilege to see and understand the emotional content of London’s everyday movements, rhythms and rituals.

The essence of the project is that you might take the same route every day but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street, takes on a random nature. To capture this flow, the concertina format of the book reflects and mimics the feel of a bus journey, but more importantly it gives the viewer the opportunity to create their own journeys by spreading the book out and combining different images together. This moves the book away from an author-led linear narrative to one of multiple possibilities.