I aim to post the work of all 11 participants on this site over the next couple of months, so this post is here to give you a flavour of the show overall and give you some of my personal impressions of the session.

Guy hanging prints - photograph by Colleen Morgan

Overall the dialogues were incredibly successful and very positive. The crowd found something good to say about the all of the contributions. The incredibly varied contributions ranged from documentary, artistic and journalistic styles through conceptual (or perhaps phenomenological) photography to found photography. Unsurprisingly, none of the contributions fitted particularly neatly into any one of these photographic genres; all could be taken to illustrate a vast range of archaeological themes.

The show and the dialogues were, in my experience, unique as a format for a conference session. Heather’s choice of removing the chairs from the gallery meant that the session was conducted on foot, with the group moving around the gallery to face the work being discussed. Each photographer stood in front of their work to make their presentation and answer questions. Colleen Morgan has already blogged about the way in which the gallery format gave the session a quite distinct feel from a standard conference session. For me, the physical movement of the participants around the room made the session (literally) more dynamic in nature than any session I have ever taken part in.

The “art gallery” as an appropriate space to exhibit art work has been the subject of lengthy and ongoing debate in the context of contemporary art. In some ways our exhibition within an art gallery stumbled into this debate. Our work definitely became modified by its transposition into a white cube, casting off some of it’s purely archaeological and academic overtones and pulling on a series of new and unexpected meanings. The idea that anything can become art because of an artist’s choice or by inclusion in an art gallery was particularly pertinent to the contributions that consisted of found photographs and vernacular photographs.

I felt that the dialogues may have lacked teeth somewhat. When compared to the harsher kind of criticism that would be expected at an art school “crit” for example, the session was pretty tame. None of the participants left the room in tears or swearing that they would never pick up another camera ever again, put it like that. The intimate setting of the dialogues was very enjoyable, but it may have prevented less reserved and more critical responses coming out.

This is Fotis’ statement about his work:

Visualizing_neolithic emerged from my photographic experiments with my study material: the personal ornaments of the Neolithic site of Dispilio, Greece. It is probable that the aesthetic properties of this aspect of material culture, the jewelry, led me from controlled and academic scale-included photographic documentation to the much more free -therefore-artistic(?)- depictions of Neolithic material culture.

The photoblog that started in 2006, has been my private web-‘shrine’, always deriving from the excavation cosmos of Dispilio. This personal nature is furthermore emphasized with the titles accompanying the images, which certainly do not act as legends but as personal interpretations, ambiguous to the potential –invisible– readers of the blog.

One of these readers was Yannis Hamilakis who led me to new experiments, first with “The Other Acropolis” and then with the “Kalaureia in the Present” project.

Fotis Ifantidis is a PhD candidate in Prehistoric Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His thesis concerns “Practices of ‘Personal’ Adornment in Neolithic Greece”. Fotis is a long term photo blogger with his site Visualizing Neolithic.

In some ways what appeals to me, on a purely personal level, in this work are the images of the 1990s. This is a time before fluorescent clothing became the norm on sites, shorts are incredibly short, army style boots are ubiquitous, clothing and equipment are subtly different from today and yet many aspects of life on site are the same. On a personal level the images capture an archaeology that was more amateur and in some ways more charming than the commercial archaeology of today.

The photographs fit within what we would recognise as documentary photography but they are also portraits, documentation and memoir. The scale of the project, a taste for collections and the time depth considered brings a distinctly archaeological flavour to the approach.

(c) Dave Webb

The following summary is from Dave’s Diggers Archive website:

“My aim … was to provide an alternative view of diggers to the back of the head normally reproduced in most archaeological texts. I should say at once that there are many good archaeological photographers out there and sometimes you do have to photograph the backs of peoples heads however this project is my attempt to redress the balance and show some of the ‘faces’ involved in archaeology. Since becoming interested in archaeology I have consumed quantities of archaeological literature. The publications sometimes contained superb examples of site photography and sometimes appalling ones but for a discipline that is concerned with documenting mans activities it seemed to have forgotten to record itself. There were always the odd shots of people poised over some interesting find, diggers being used as human scales or the occasional end of dig team shot but no real documentary work to record the people who do the excavation.

Initially I tried following in the traditional style of documentary work however I found that the resulting images tended to illustrate an event or mood rather than the diggers themselves. Whilst working on site at Essendon in 1993 I tried a change of approach to the subject and adopted a more portrait style of recording somewhat influenced by the work of August Sanders and others. Finding that the results matched my desired aim of ‘showing the face’ of archaeological diggers I decided to continue the project in this vein whenever possible.

At first I had no outlet for my work other than showing them to friends and colleagues but in 1996 Hedley Swain (see Mirroring Reality section of site) arranged for some of the images to appear in the IFA journal The Archaeologist (Winter 1996 no 27), this led to further use of some of the images by the IFA and an exhibition of a selection of the prints at the Bournemouth T.A.G conference in 1996. Since then I have been gradually accumulating more images until in 2002 I reached the point where I realised I would need to find some form of display if the images were to have any purpose, this decision led to the creation of my web site.”

To see more of Dave Webb’s photography please visit his website: The Diggers Archive.

In his own words:

Ancient conceptions of place varied widely between Aristotle’s preference for topos and Plato’s emphasis on chora. Aristotle’s topos suggests an objective point on a map that exerts no actual influence upon those who enter. Whereas Plato’s preference for chora, which draws upon the etymological root of “choreography,” as the reciprocal dance between humanity and environment. While topographic mapping and Global Position systems are remarkably helpful to research and convenient for day-to-day living, it is through continued presence and interaction in the landscape that allows the intimacy of chora to emerge from the plotted points and coordinates. While archaeological work relies upon topos, it cultivates chora.

My work for the PKAP residency functions on several levels: documentary, landscape, and archive of topos and chora. By drawing upon both ancient conceptions of place, I was keenly aware of our contemporary presence in the landscape as researchers. This reflexive stance guided my efforts to document this emerging diachronic perspective of the historical landscape. As human presence transforms topos to chora it becomes archaeological evidence. Similarly, the photographic project provides a document of ongoing human presence and an archive of evidence of the 2009 PKAP field season and this Mediterranean landscape.

Ryan Stander is currently completing an M.F.A. in Mixed Media at The University of North Dakota, his interests range widely across art and religion/theology. His focus is on the cultivation of place and its significance for human life; he states “approaching place from two disciplines offers a variety of unique conversation points, methodologies, and surprising trajectories”. Ryan hopes to follow the MFA with a Ph.D. in theology or religious studies.

Sara Perry’s work on the use of imagery in archaeology is an inspiration for this project itself. We aim to use this project as a way to respond to the questions she is raising, to try to break conventional way imagery is often used in archaeological publications and to demonstrate in what practical ways this might be done.

Sara’s work is about challenging the way images are used, reprinted and recycled often uncritically in archaeological media. Her work also touches on the ways in which digital media and analogue media interact and the way in which new media fuse and blend traditional media. Read her full abstract below:

The apparently commonsense notion that digital media are refiguring the possibilities of visuality in archaeology obscures the fact that diverse graphic interventions have always been bound into disciplinary transformations. The novelty of the digital is arguably flattening our sense of the depth of visual innovation, leaving archaeology’s complex genealogy of pictorial experimentation largely unnoticed. New media tend to be the yields of—or fusions between—older forms of media and older traditions of manipulating such forms; they speak of successive layers of materials and people etching onto and amplifying one another. To forget about this interaction is to falsely approach digital photography, for instance, as a singular entity pushing the limits of visuality on its own, as though detached from any lineage of graphic/material practice.

The archival record hints at the cyborg nature of historical visual engagements in archaeology, wherein mechanical and human articulations are combined in ways that presage current modes of digitality. Graffitied and tagged, cut, pasted and re-articulated, re-photographed, printed and multiply-circulated, these older visual media manifest the very intertextual, interactive, collaborative and citational forms now so commonly attributed to modern digital environments alone. They, like the digital photograph, are marked by interference and composite constitution and, as such, testify to the inherent multimodality of visual traditions. They, like this volume itself, speak to the impossibility of isolating or privileging one medium above another—or, as per herein, of even conveying the potentials of (digital) photography without mobilising manifold analog forms and, ultimately, materialising as printed pages in a book. Graphic multimedia, from such a viewpoint, are neither novel nor unparalleled, but are at once archaeology’s history and future.

Sara Perry is a PhD student in archaeology at the University of Southampton. She completed her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC, Canada) and has since presented these studies in articles and at conferences in Canada, the US, Australia and Europe. Her research interests centre on archaeological visual representation, visual methodologies, the history of science, archaeological theory and practice, and critical pedagogy. Her PhD thesis probes the epistemological significance of imagery in the professionalisation of archaeology.

(c) Heather Law

In her own words:

Although industry standards in artifact photography are often put forward in an attempt to maintain some level of objectivity, illustrative photographs in archaeological publications often succeed in communicating little but the commonness and insignificance of the material culture in question, especially when the artifacts are the result of mass production in the industrial era.

Without a doubt there are times when scales, backdrops and shadow free lighting become necessary tools in the creation of effective visual aids, however the insistence on these conventions exclusive of other styles seems limiting with the realization that a photographer is no more objective than an author.

In the world of historical archaeology, where so much of the material culture recovered is seemingly the same mass produced objects; photography has the distinct ability to capture both the affective qualities of these objects as they appealed to the consumer as well as the patina of a unique use life. What stories are told in the images on a serving vessel? How can the physical textures of use, discard, and decay tell an object’s life history?

While the artifacts are often a result of mass production, they are also objects of individual consumption- consumption which was at least in part dictated by a growing sense of individuality in the industrial era. Because we seek to access the consumer through these objects, perhaps artifact photography should focus more on the material qualities which may have made these objects appealing to individuals and show them as they were experienced by these individuals- individuals who were producing subjectivities and identities through the practices of consumption.

Heather Law is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s interested in exploring Native American engagement of the capitalist colonial project through historical archaeology. She is currently working in New England, researching Native craftswomen of the 18th and 19th centuries.

First up is Giorgio Verdiani, whose work seeks to provoke real and imagined memories of archaeological and historical sites. Giorgio’s work interests me because of the way he mixes media to try to find the most expressive image; trying to present often subjective and personal experience of a place to the viewer.

(c) Giorgio Verdiani

In his own words:

An archaeological monument is a place for everybody’s imagination, a place where we might wonder about people in ancient times or about the appearance of the place when it was used for its original purpose. Nowadays a site appears as a ruin or as an evocative mass which might bring the eyes to an even more complex reading, suggesting impressions nearer to those we get from the pure shapes of a sculpture than the original structure of an architectural form.

In this way the monument becomes a special object where the work of men is altered by human and natural action, bringing back a wide stochastic influence over the actual appearance. The site becomes a sort of object with poetic features bringing to the observer possibilities of vision and resonance.

In this way the photographic approach to a monument can aim to capture something behind or beyond the descriptive level or the needs of documentation, moreover it will go far beyond of the specific technical needs of creating orthographic imaging or high quality texturing.

The use of “vintage” cameras in an analog workflow combined with digital post processing, the use of infrared digital photography, processing based on digital raw images or direct HDRI gathering are only a part of a whole range of possibilities allowed by contemporary photography, but when approaching a monumental context like Villa Adriano (Hadrian’s Villa) or Grotto di Tiberio (Tiberius Cave), to name just two well known examples , the possibilities must be filtered by a sense of composition and by an interpretative intellectual process allowing the image to transmit a specific perception of the place to the final observer. My work is about this balance and about the specific features that this approach brings.

Giorgio Verdiani, born in Carrara in 1968 has a Degree and a PhD from the “Facoltà di Architettura” (Architecture Faculty) of Florence, Italy. He was a contract researcher from 2001 to 2006 and is now an ICAR17 Researcher. He teaches Computer Graphics, Architectural Drawing and Photography in the degree courses of the “Facoltà di Architettura”. Giorgio is an expert in Cultural Heritage Surveys, especially with laserscan technologies and has been involved with all of the main survey campaigns of his university department since the 2002. Giorgio is currently working on a survey and research project about Villa Adriana and other monumental places around Italy.

To see more of his photography please visit his Flickr stream.

We are looking for quality submissions from archaeologist | photographers who are pushing the limits with either analogue or digital photography.  These submissions should include 3-5 illustrative photographs and a 250 word abstract outlining your particular theoretical approach, methodology, or experiences in the field.

Submissions are due September 30, 2009.