The link between architectural photography and archaeology in my work is rather personal. It has more to do with the experiences that can shape one's aesthetic vision, and less with a conscious underlying theoretical framework. A framework still exists of course, as does a particular mode of looking at structures and surface materiality that stems directly from the skill-set acquired through archaeological research.
The scale of archaeological photography varies from the small object, to the underground mural, up to the full-fledged excavation site documentation. While the small scale developed by material observation qualities, it was during my long involvement in the last type of photographic project that I put together a visual vocabulary; one that reads structures as components of a site, or landscape.
Several years spent exploring excavated architecture around the Mediterranean world provided me with a unique understanding of this reciprocal connection; a knowledge that eventually became a foundation and bridge facilitating my shift from landscape into architecture photography. During my first visit in the Atacama Desert in 2007, I found myself stranded in a vast desert without any points of reference apart from dry lagoons, volcanoes and scattered boulders of varying sizes. I had to draw upon my experience in archaeological photography and treat those natural formations as ruined structures, remnants of human activity fighting a losing battle with time and one of the harshest landscapes on earth.
From my very first attempt at photographing architecture in December 1995 I realized that I wanted both building and landscape to narrate a common story and form an inseparable whole.
Looking back to my formative years as an undergraduate student of photography and later as an archeological photographer, while landscape has always been my main concern and focus, there was a constant struggle to locate structures and blend them through the composition into a new composite landscape. I am using the word ‘structures’ in the most liberal sense possible, since for several years these had been either natural formations like rocks, plant life or especially in my early archaeological career, ruins. The search for structures stemmed out of the need to locate and explore relations between those lonely elements –almost like fictional characters- and the landscape; tension through the transition from one to the other, aroused curiosity through their dialogue.
The act of photography of architecture (not necessarily architectural photography), can uncover and intensify interactions between artificial artifacts and their respective environments, thereby transcending the utilitarian documentation aspect of the medium and acting as a tool for interpretation and comprehension.
Man-made structures are always situated in an environment: a natural, urban or even abstract landscape that keeps evolving. Awareness of that context does not only provide us with information and a better understanding of the photographed object, but also a glimpse into the natural forces that affect it and might have shaped its original conception.
