archaeography

Meg recently posted an image of the Stoa of Attalos in Athens under the title "voyeurism". [Link]

I had taken virtually this same photograph on my own visit to this monument to a reconstructed utopia.

Is it voyeurism? Are we too enamored of the look of the past? And does photography bolster this alienation from the past, from experience?

I think we might be too convinced by that critique of modernism that would have us believe that our eyes and photography's visuality are solely ideological agents of a fetshized and alienated world.

Susan Sontag's "On Photography" had a great influence on me some years ago - particularly when I was writing of the photographic mindset of museum aesthetics in "ReConstructing Archaeology" (Cambridge 1987) - a line of argument that ironically gained the opprobrium of some vituperative feminist colleagues.

But Sontag now reads like a paranoid and closeted critic who had little insight into photo-work.

For me this kind of photograph is predominantly about that crucial issue of "genre"

This may get in the way of appreciating what we are visiting and looking at, true.

Just like any other kind of prejudgement. But we kind of have to start somewhere. We might argue for some kind of no pure un-mediated experience. But how would we express that, even to ourselves, without some kind of medium?

And this brings me to what Meg was talking about in her series on "The Production of Space"