Fashion Photographer Terry Tsiolis’ New Muse? His Mother

Years before he became a fashion photographer, Terry Tsiolis was taking notes on the lavish outfits his mother put together. Dimitra Tsiolis, who immigrated to Montreal from Greece 67 years ago, is an accomplished seamstress who would enlist Terry and his sisters in the creation of her pieces. “It would be like, ‘Let’s buy the fabric or let’s figure out how to make a pattern. What’s the inspiration?’ We would look through magazines together,” recalls Tsiolis, whose career has included photographing Margot Robbie, Rihanna, and Sam Smith and lensing campaigns for clients like Burberry, Tom Ford, and Calvin Klein. “Then we would see the process of the dress being made. It wasn’t just her buying something and putting it on, it was a journey.”

Those days were on his mind when he began taking photographs of his mother while he spent three months living with her in Canada after the 2019 death of his father. Dimitra dressed up for the portraits, which were taken over the course of four years, and chose the settings. “Each outfit brought be back to a certain point in my life and certain memories with my mother, and I think it did the same for her,” Tsiolis says.

Tsiolis found encouragement from his colleague and close friend friend Alex Gonzalez, the former creative director of ELLE, who urged him to exhibit the 39-picture series and ended up curating the resulting show, “Portraits of My Mother,” which will run tomorrow, September 7, through September 30 at the Salmagundi Club in New York City. “It also allowed me to see my mother in a different light,” Tsiolis says of the project. “It allowed us to develop a photographic relationship without speaking to each other. We were doing it through images, through the expression of clothing, through the expression of artistry, through the expression of mother son bonds.”

Keep scrolling for an exclusive look inside the exhibition.