Word: photograph
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ARECENT TIME article on Puerto Rico carried the obligatory and classic photograph of a Latin American city. In the foreground stand shacks, slum alleys, and ragged brown children; in the background rise white concrete and glass office buildings. One can find such an image of inequality in Caracas, Lima, Mexico City, or San Juan. It appears to make a profound statement about contrasts in underdeveloped countries, until one recalls the famous photo poster of the Sixties showing dilapidated shacks, broken streets, and ragged black children. In that case, however, the city was Northeast Washington D.C., and the structure...
...pastiche of slides and sound satirizing box-office biggies from The Guns of Navarone to The Godfather, strung together by skits parodying disaster films. But the idea of L.A. smothered by 2000 feet of waste just doesn't make it, nor does the last-ditch seduction scene of a photographer on the eve of the city's destruction: "Please photograph me. I mean, I know we're not going to have time to develop...
...photographers' view of these ruins, churches, monuments as defined, standing clearly apart from their surroundings, as objects for a scientific investigation, which, like the photograph, aims to reveal the hidden secrets of the temple, contrasts sharply with Piranesi's mythical vision of Ozymandian monuments, overgrown with vegetation, sunk in the accumulated dust of ages, eroded stone structures are feats of mathematics and engineering; Piranesi's are works of the gods, Cyclopean walls. The eighteenth-century people who infallibly appear in his drawings use the ruins as cow fields (the Forum), houses (the Temple of Vesta), or buttresses for their...
...centuries since Piranesi have demystified both nature and the past modern explorers have excavated the Campo Vaccino (Cow Field), restored the temples and the Colosseum. The Tiber Island has been firmly established as dry land; the Arch of Titus shorn of vines and bushes. Levit's photographs testify to the knowledge and understanding we've gained--and the drama lost. Piranesi, in one of his more imaginative moments, etched a smart temple at Tivoli, surrounded by figures in various melodramatic poses, stalking the ruined stairs, lurking behind the columns. One dark figure assumes a Byronic posture in the doorway...
...difference that the temple itself has been cleaned and restored? Or that the photograph renders it in a more "objective" light? What the exhibit shows perhaps, is that the process works both ways. Rome has changed and has been changed by our views...