Documenting our Landscape

Photographing in Pompeii is something of a paradox, a conundrum. If, as I have argued, photography captures an instant in time then walking through this dead, destroyed, restored Roman city captures an instant of time quite after the historical fact; nothing more than the bleached bones of an ancient metropolis. Is an image of Pompeii, then, a nostalgic exploration of a time long past, or is it a visual record of that which exists at the moment of shutter release…or, perhaps, both or neither. The ruins at Pompeii are at once an historical site, an artifact of a time always already gone, and a living monument to the present as a source of historical data and archeological evidence of the life once lived and presently lived under the active volcano Mt. Vesuvius. The ruins are also a testament to the resources of human beings put to use in the desire to recover that which is lost, a preservation of a trace.