Yannis Hamilakis
Lecturer in Archaeology
Department of Archaeology
University of Southampton (UK)
Thanks to a Friends of Firestone Library fellowship I
was able to spend a month at Princeton and use the invaluable resources
of the library. The material (the Bonfils photographs of archaeological
monuments of Athens) allowed a broad discussion on how the then new
technique of photography (invented in 1839) shaped the attitudes towards
classical antiquity in the West; it also permits us to explore the intersection
between two devices of modernity: the photographic and the archaeological.
Bonfils was following the 'pilgrim's trail' through the
'sacred' sites and places of classicism but at the same time he was
using a new technique for the "management of attention," in many ways
different from the earlier techniques of travel writing and drawing
that early travellers used. He was participating in an international
visual economy which demanded certain stereotypical images of classical
antiquity. Photography coincided with the emergence of a new kind of
individualised observer within a field of regimented vision (a proto-society
of the spectacle); within this framework, mass-produced photographs
of standardised views of classical monuments contributed to the disembodied
and mystifying reception of classical antiquity. At the same time, archaeologists
operating within the framework of classicism and nationalism, were engaging
(through selective excavation, demolition and rebuilding) in the material
production of idealised and sanitized classical monuments. Archaeologists
on the ground were staging the themes that photographers were reproducing
and circulating. Classicism, national imagination, archaeology and photography
were thus different aspects of the same process: modernity was creating
its charter myth with its material and visual signifiers.
The results of this work were published in the journal
History of Photography vol. 25 (1), 2001, pp. 5-12 and 23-43.
I have also presented them at a workshop organised by the Program in
Hellenic Studies, Princeton University (27 April 2001), and at an international
conference at Southampton on representations of the past (November 2000);
I also plan to contribute to the Princeton University Library Chronicle
special issue on "Ancient Greece through Modern Eyes," currently in
preparation. Finally, my work has contributed to the preparation of
the exhibition of this material, currently on show in the Firestone
Library. Once more, I am grateful to the Library and its staff and Friends
for the support and for the assistance they provided during my research
at Princeton.
libraryf@princeton.edu
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