Exposing Archaeology: Time in Archaeological Photographs

Abstract

Chronology in archaeology is usually thought of in terms of absolute or relative dates. Archaeology and photography share a common interest in how something of the past can exist in the present. In Classical Archaeology the boundary between scientific and aesthetic images remained as blurry as the distinction between archaeology and art. Archaeological photographs efface the decision-making of the photographer, so that the viewer looks through the image to see the archaeology in the frame, past the acts of framing. The staging was not meant to be revealed, but in some photographs a hand holding up the backdrop is inadvertently photographed. But archaeological photographs can intervene with time not just through presence and absence, but through making cross-temporal analogies. The archaeological photograph has the indexical quality of a trace insofar as it was formed as light from archaeological materials hit the film in the duration of exposure.

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