archaeography

Birr Castle
Co. Offaly, Ireland
July 2004

I have posted these musings on archaeography.com because I think that these worries about how the body constitutes space are shared by photographer and archaeologist. One essential difference is that the photographer is filtering his or her own experience of space through the lens – photographer as cyborg – and then asking the viewer to experience that past experience of space, now filtered and frozen, through a medium that has only two dimensions and is void of sensual experience and above all, memory, the assemblage of memories within the photographer’s mind that conditioned and constructed that space. But is this so different from the archaeological construction of space? An archaeologist experiences space – ruins, a trench, field notes in a storeroom -- and then filters it through theory or methodology or world view and presents it to the reader in narrative form – two dimensions on the page. The glory of good writing, like good photography, is that it transcends space by stimulating the reader's/viewer's memory, which can, in turn, have a profound physical effect on the body.