I was quite pleased with the special Blurb edition of the review of theatre/archaeology that Mike Pearson and I just published (good quality imagery, reasonable typography and layout) [Link] [Link] So I ran up a new portfolio of my rephotographed daguerreotypes – “Ghosts in the Mirror”. Ghosts in the Mirror by Michael Shanks Here…
(past) presences
Richard III found? – why it matters
It’s all over the news today – the claim that the 500 year old body found by archaeologists under a parking lot in Leicester UK is that of Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England who fell at Bosworth Field in 1485, losing his throne to Henry Tudor. For much of the popular press…
rephotography – Road&Track
Photography frames and fixes This can be enabling – seeing things through a detail, microcosmic part for whole – synechdoche – the oligopticon, where macro ladidary detail ironically offers more than the wide angle or panorama (contrast the panopticon). The world in a grain of sand. And disabling – frames restrict and compress, and fixity can…
political engagement, contemporary art, archaeology
Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art has just closed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Link] [Link] The topic of the exhibition – contemporary art in six “far-flung” cities not typically defined as traditional centers of the art world: Beirut, Cali, Cluj-Napoca, Ho Chi Minh City, San Francisco, Tangier. Ostensibly this is…
the archaeological uncanny
Gabriel Moshenska has sent me his recent and very neat article about the archaeological uncanny in the ghost stories of MR James. Gabriel is quite right, I think, to highlight the connection between Freud’s unheimlich, ghosts, and the haunting persistence, sometimes malevolent, of the past – MR James made much of the curses that can…
Heritage Open Days
More confirmation of the spread of that contemporary and popular sensibility attuned to the resonances of pasts-in-the-present. English Heritage, the government agency, has put up nearly half a million dollars for a weekend of 4500 heritage open houses. This is the biggest heritage event in the UK this year. Peter Saunders in his re-creation of…
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