Tezos

Second Tier, Panathenaic Stadium

Creator

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Description

Built c. 330 BC; rebuilt 144 AD; excavated 1869 AD; refurbished 1895 AD. This collection explores the modern experience of ancient sites and the fractured narratives evoked by the realities of mass tourism, conservation, and archaeological inquiry. The visitor’s experience is modified and directed by the audioguide and interpretation board, their exploration contained by roped walkways. This experience coexists with the realities of conservation and reconstruction attempting to fix the ruins in time, and strip away the accumulated stories of centuries of changing use and abandonment. Selected from images made on a recent trip to Athens, this collection was not planned or conceived in advance. Unlike the majority of my work, the project came about as an open-ended, real-time response to historical sites in their contemporary context; thronged with tourists, crawling with conservators, and obscured by scaffolding. The ‘clean view’ sought by the travel supplement photographer simply doesn’t exist. Drawing on my moving image work, this series makes use of the extreme close-up as a way of cutting up views into fragments without context, resulting in a series of clues that invite reconstruction into new narratives. This series has been influenced by emerging post-photographic practices which reflect the lost veracity of the photographic image in the age of digital synthesis. Using ‘pure’ photography (camera, lens, virtually no editing) out of a desire to set away from the control I usually exercise in my work, I wanted to create images that fracture the dense narratives accumulated around these historical sites; a kind of post-truth visual mythology.

Traits

Tag

photography

Tag

athens