Over the course of several trips, the London-based photographer Max Lancaster documented the scenes and people of Patmos, a Greek island he’s been visiting for nearly two decades. Document’s Associate Visuals Director Phil Backes joins Lancaster to chat about the origins and surprises of the series.

Phil Backes: What is your connection to Patmos and the inhabitants that you photographed for this series?

Max Lancaster: Patmos is a small island in the Aegean Sea that is quite difficult to reach from Athens. For this reason, it remains largely unspoiled, which is why my parents love it and have been taking me there since I was about four years old (I’m now 23). They’ve been visiting the island since their 20s. Interestingly, my girlfriend and I recently realized that we were probably there at the same time when we were both teenagers. So, as a whole, Patmos holds a lot of sentimental value for me.

Phil: What did you hope to document through your time on the island?

Max: While traveling to Patmos, I realized that I had been there so many times but had never really taken any meaningful photos. I approached it quite spontaneously—I knew I mainly wanted to photograph people. So I rented a little 50cc motorbike, which I managed to crash (and restore) within the first 15 minutes. After that, I spent my time riding around in the early evenings, exploring roads I hadn’t been down before and stopping whenever I came across interesting people on the streets.

Phil: What kind of relationships did you build with your subjects? What were people’s reactions to your desire to photograph them?

Max: Before photographing the boys on the football pitch, I asked for permission from their coach, who luckily spoke English. The first thing she said was, ‘Aren’t you the boy who crashed his bike?’ I asked how she knew, and she told me word had spread around the island. We laughed about the situation, chatted a bit about how long she had been on the island, and then she gave me the green light to take photos of the kids who wanted to participate.

The man with the long white beard, who looks a bit like Santa, caught my attention because he sat in the same bar, in the same seat, all day, every day. Toward the end of my trip, I decided to sit at the table next to him, ordered a beer, and before I knew it, he was asking me about my camera and wondering why pretty women no longer looked his way. After a while, I told him a photo might help attract some attention, and he was more than eager to let me take his picture. (For those curious, he can be found at Bar Aroma in Kampos.) I also saw Nadia Lee Cohen—a photographer whose work I admire—also posted a photo of him on her Instagram. I guess he’s quite an icon now!

Phil: What did you discover in this process and will you be building upon this series? What do you hope to communicate through it?

Max: I discovered that you can form a connection with people even if you can’t communicate through speech. I remember every moment I shared with the people I photographed, and those interactions deepened my connection to Patmos. I also feel like I saw a different side of the island—one I hadn’t noticed before. It was fascinating to get a glimpse into how locals perceive tourists and what their daily lives entail, and it’s definitely incomparable to life in London.

Through this series, I wanted to capture what life is like on an island so far removed from Western cosmopolitan cities. Most of the people I photographed are smiling, and many of them lead relatively stress-free lives. I think it highlights that, as humans, we don’t necessarily need all this added technology to improve our wellbeing.

I hope to continue this as an ongoing series throughout my life to document how the island changes. If I’m honest, though, I hope it doesn’t.