A conversation with photographer Graeme Williams [Link] last November prompted me to reorganize and review my own photowork. Here’s one result. Archaeography — where the performance of photowork meets an archaeological sensibility.Exploring the shared practices of archaeology and photography — working with remains, attending to traces, and composing with absence. Since the 1970s I have…
archaeography
Robert Longo’s archaeological sensibility
An exhibition of works by Robert Longo at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art [Link]. Raft at Sea 2016-17 Longo traces photographs in charcoal. Large scale charcoal drawings. Of photographs. Blow-ups — upscaled photographs — traced projections. Iceberg for C.D.F (Caspar David Friedrich), 2015-16; The Western Wall, 2011 (Jerusalem) Stand back and you see the BIG…
IN MEMORIAM
Warkworth, Northumberland UK. Seats set up along the River Coquet in memory of those who enjoyed the view.
Tower in the North
Edlingham, Northumberland UK. Series – TVRRIS. (The tower appeared on the cover of my 1992 book Experiencing the Past – [Link] ) Archaeographic notes: There emerged in eighteenth-century Europe a distinctively modern aesthetic of ruin, part of an antiquarian and romantic sensibility. This series aims to question, reconfigure, reanimate the picturesque castle ruin in the…
ghost in the mirror
media archaeology More than twenty years ago I discovered the daguerreotype — one of the earliest of photographic media. Images are formed in a camera on polished light sensitive silver-plated copper—on mirrors. These are not just simply early photographs. They are unique one-off images, and positive-negative—you have to catch the mirrored surface at the right…
A journey round my father: methodological notes on an archaeological sensibility
This is a commentary on a recent post on this site – A journey round my father [Link]. It’s about the features, concepts, tools and techniques of a reclaimed archaeological sensibility that help us connect with a complex world in flux. Bjørnar (Olsen) was visiting in the Spring when my father took another fall at…