657 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94105 TEL: 415 512 2020 FAX: 415 512 7109 sfcamera@sfcamerawork.org Return to Journal Index Directions

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Fall/Winter 1997, Volume 24, No.2 Photography and Archaeology: A Template for Investigation Guest Editor: Jane Levy Reed Table of Contents • In This Issue • $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart] table of contents 1. In This Issue by Jane Levy Reed and Douglas Nickel 4. Arquelogies of Tomorrow by Joan Fontcuberta 10. Among the Ruins by Jülide Aker 16. The Archaeology of Photography: "An Inquiry Into the Significance of Ruins in Contemporary Photography" Sandro Oramas 23. Portfolio "Still Rooms & Excavations" Photographs by Richard Barnes Essay by Doug Nickel 34. Images of the Future The Architecture of A New Geography by Kyong Park 38. Book Review Photography after Photography Memory and Representation in the Digital Age by Michael Read 40. Books Received and Noted 44. In the Gallery Recent Exhibition at SF Camerawork in this issue This issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts is devoted to unearthing a growing contemporary interest among photographers in the manipulation of history, both real and imaginary, using archaeology as a template for investigation. It takes as its starting point the trend in today's photography that seeks to create a past that never was, and constantly tests what is real and what is not. The works and texts that appear here all share the conviction that archaeology just might represent something more to our culture than the mere excavation of dead and buried civilizations. In their recently published book Ground Penetrating Radar, An Introduction for Archaeologists, Lawrence B. Conyers and Dean Goodman discuss today's inclination toward "rescue" archaeology and site conservation, where noninvasive methods of subsurface analysis are deployed. Ground penetrating radar works by reflecting radar waves off subsurface features in a way similar to how standard radar is used to detect airplanes in the sky, producing an accurate three-dimensional stratigraphic images of buried sites, even whole villages. The writers and artists presented here might be seen to be using their own mind penetrating radar to challenge our concepts of reality and the authority of our historical models. Joan Fontcuberta leads us through work created by a number of German, Russian, American, Greek, and French photographers who have been affected by the vertiginous pace of modern development, an expansion that pushes aside all but its own reality. One response has been to reenvision reality: Joachim Schmid makes museum treasures out of garbage; David Wilson's meta-museum deconstructs its own discourse; Thierry Urbain recreates an archaeology of Babylon so desirable that it is impossible. These artists and others all interrogate the way meaning is constructed by obstensibly neutral cultural institutions. Jülide Aker examines the relationship between photography and archaeology through the work of four photographers: Judy Natal, Mimmo Jodice, Emmet Gowin, and Laura Foos. Natal prints images of Greek and Roman statues on marble slabs to create a depth and texture that both invite and frustrate the sense of touch. Jodice photographs the tattered figures and dilapidated monuments of the Hellenic Mediterranean; his use of light and soft focus creates images that are neither here in the present nor there in the past. Gowin upsets the boundaries of form in the long- dead city of Petra in what is now Jordan. His clarity of focus and abrupt transitions between light and dark flatten space, and ultimately question the difference between man-made and natural environments. Foos' photographs are actual artifacts of field archaeology. The lens of her plastic camera abrades the subject with unpredictable refractions of light, exaggerating nearby objects and minimizing distant ones in a way that suggests how time erodes matter and distorts memories. Sandro Oramas surveys the use of ruins as an iconographic theme, from their inclusion in medieval religious paintings to the painterly work of nineteenth-century photographers and the utilitarian approach of the early twentieth century. The photography of the last twenty years reveals a deep preoccupation with notions of time, history, and culture. Modern-day ruins, caused by war and natural disasters, exist side-by-side with ancient ruins rediscovered using sensibilities that can be, in turn, romantic, mystical, objective, analytic, or exotic. In support of his thesis, Oramas cites works by Koudelka, Peress, de Clercq, White, Misrach, and Conner among many others. Douglas Nickel takes a Giorgio Sommer photograph of a plaster cast from Pompeii as his point of departure for a meditation on Richard Barnes's work at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Barnes's views of the museum sitting above its own excavation, presiding over the bones and buttons of San Francisco's original settlers, raises disturbing questions about the kinds of objects we choose to put on display and the kind we hide away. In this project, photography–like other tools of archaeology–becomes a powerful metaphor of our own self-made social identity. Kyong Park delineates the fragmentation of contemporary cities and the disposable culture, which mark the advance of globalization, as examined in a recent exhibition he organized in Korea. The result of these processes is a homogeneous city, independent of place, resembling nothing so much as every other mall, hotel, office complex everywhere else. Enclaves separate the rich from the poor, ghettoizing everyone, as the old idea of fortification returns with new technologies and armaments. Old boundaries are broken and new maps are drawn, radically mutating our social and individual spaces. At a time when prisons are one of the largest growth industries in the United States, James Casebere's photographs of imagined prisons question the reality not only of architectural truth but, more important, the archaeology of our imprisoned minds. As David Byrne laments in a recent recording, "My baby saw the future and she doesn't want to live there." The Casebere images reproduced in this issue remind us that science, photography, and archaeology are all products of a nineteenth-century sense of certainty that no longer holds true. Artists, writers, poets, and musicians are reexamining the foundations of the past with tools and techniques that blur the lines between fact and intuition. The invisible cities, manufactured walls, and dreamscapes of the imagination presented here are a reaction to our urban, suburban, and superurban cities metasticizing into a global megalopolis. Today's ruins have become the artifacts of our archaeological future, a future very much on the minds of those who have elected themselves the authors of our historical present. Jane Levy Reed and Douglas Nickel home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 1999. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.