In 1839, when François Arago first presented the photographic processes of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce to the French Chamber of Deputies, he declared photography’s utility to the field of archaeology. Thus, photography’s link to archaeology was recognized almost from the outset. In his new book, Photography and Archaeology, Frederick N. Bohrer specifically argues that photography maintains an archaeological way of seeing. As these fields developed through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bohrer argues, they symbiotically influenced each other in a number of ways. He focuses mostly on the roles of photography in the “object-based” practice of archaeology in the Mediterranean, Near East, and the Americas (with brief forays into Asia and northwestern Europe) from the mid-nineteenth century on, though he also examines architectural, aerial, and site-based photography. Photography and Archaeology is part of Reaktion Books’s “Exposures” series, which explores the history of photography from thematic perspectives or within specific geographic contexts. Bohrer’s volume provides a stimulating introduction to the interactions of photography and archaeology and frames a number of issues raised by practitioners and scholars in these two fields.

Photography and Archaeology comprises an introduction (“The Image as Object”) and four chapters, each of which is devoted to a distinct theme and its explanatory concept: “Science, or Truth,” “Travel, or Presence,” “Meaning, or the Archive,” and “Art, or Reframing.” In his introduction, Bohrer states that, “looking at things archaeologically is looking for absence as much as for presence” and suggests that photography held out the promise from its earliest days of mechanically rendering an objective image of the remnants of the past by which such absence could be made material (7). One of the central tensions presented in Photography and Archaeology is between this semblance of objectivity and the ways in which photography in and of archaeology (as in all other areas) subjectively constructs narratives. Bohrer suggests that scholars ought to be conscious of images as objects in themselves as a way of acknowledging this fundamental aspect of photography and recognizing the emphasis on material remains within the reconstruction of human activity with which archaeology itself is most concerned. (Bohrer ties this idea later in the book to a post-processual methodology in archaeology, in which archaeologists make explicit their own participation in the construction of the past; see 66.) The link between archaeology and photography is parsed further, as Bohrer notes several photographic theorists’ and practitioners’ use of archaeology as a metaphor, including Roland Barthes, Berenice Abbott, and Walter Benjamin (8–9). Bohrer presents a key concept here that is carried throughout the text: he compares photography to a “physiognomic” archaeological vision of a given subject, as opposed to an earlier anatomical imaging through measured drawings, sketches, and the like (22). This physiognomic seeing transported viewers to distant sites or gathered together disparate remains in one place, aiding scientific investigation of artifacts and monuments and helping to popularize the field of archaeology among the general public. Bohrer’s introduction also cites two types of photography within archaeology: a photography that looks “through” the image to an object, site, or building, and one by which someone looks “at” the subject (26). He links the former mode to archaeology at its most scientific, in which a photograph is a record that allows for analysis of the thing pictured, while the latter posits that the photograph is an object in itself to be examined in full. Photographs of the latter type are more often linked to an artistic vision of the archaeological, setting up another tension found throughout the volume.

In chapter 1, Bohrer examines the claim of objectivity in archaeological photography, and notes two phases to the history of the medium’s use in the discipline. In a first, early phase, there is an excitement about photography’s seemingly truthful, objective recording of data. He traces this in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expeditions, which saw photography as holding the promise of a new means of preserving and restoring the past, and of quickly, efficiently, and authoritatively rendering sites through an unimpeachable mechanical process, seen as free from the potential of human error. Later, from the 1930s forward, Bohrer sees a “resignation” to the use of photography in archaeological recording, in which practitioners acknowledge its usefulness but also the faults of the medium (27–29; see also chapter 2, 82–83, and chapter 3, 138). Bohrer notes the split between the “usefulness versus the accuracy” of photography (58). By way of explication of his “at/through” construction and notions of excitement and resignation to the uses of photography in archaeology, Bohrer cites George Andrew Reisner, Maxime du Camp, and Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, among others. Reisner in particular expressed the idea that a knowledgeable scientific archaeologist best understood archaeological images because of their “privileged memory” (50). Already familiar with a site and its original materials, such scholars could look through a photograph to reanimate their recollection of previously studied materials. Technology is mentioned toward the end of the chapter, particularly in reference to more contemporary rendering such as three-dimensional archaeometry and other modern techniques. These Bohrer feels seek to correct some of the issues with earlier photographic processes, but also present new challenges. They show the object as indistinct from its record, as virtual reconstructions replace absences in material remains (64–66).

Chapter 2 examines the presence of archaeologists, or the lack thereof, in images from sites, including the imaging of local nationals employed both as excavators and photographers at excavations directed by foreign nationals. The politics of such presence/absence is briefly discussed, though an even deeper consideration of this aspect of archaeological photography would have been welcome (76, 78–80; and more interestingly later in the chapter, with an example from Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan, 100–2). The chapter is most concerned with the desire in canonical archaeological photography to establish a protocol that erases the presence of the archaeologist from the image in order to convey a sense of accuracy and objectivity (even if this semblance is only illusory; 84). Bohrer argues that aerial photography, borne out of military photography during World War I, is most tied to this archaeological protocol as it removes even a human scale from archaeological imagery (85–92). Bohrer pushes this analysis to a logical concluding example in Google Earth, which moves the discussion from the aerial to the orbital (92). (Recent satellite images of Apamea and other sites looted in Syria during its present war bear witness to this argumentation, with an added political urgency.) He ends the chapter by concluding that, as archaeology progressed into the twentieth century and protocols in the field became more systematized and hierarchical overall, archaeological photography became more depersonalized and standardized in its ways of seeing (104).

In the third chapter, Bohrer discusses the uses of archaeological photography for historical research and argumentation. In one of the most interesting sections of the entire book, Bohrer examines photographs as primary artifacts themselves, both in the past and the present, and posits their “rhetorical and evidentiary functions” for researchers (106). Here, Bohrer returns to the nineteenth-century moment at which both scientific archaeology and photography came about, and which also gave rise to the modern archive. (He does not explicitly link this moment to the imperialist and nationalist claims that underlay many such initiatives, though Bohrer characterizes these images as ideological; elsewhere in the chapter examples that bear out such readings are discussed; see 113, 116–17). Many archaeologists in the period used photography as a way to make permanent a “momentary vision” (i.e., to fix what was seen on site or during object examination), as well as to compile through images and juxtapose in new relationships objects that were under scientific study. Such novel visual experiences created new meanings for objects and sites that changed as the selection of photographs brought together was altered (106). Again, a tension arises between archaeological photography as an objective, truthful record and as a constructed, almost imaginary, aide. The chapter also briefly explores the notion of scientific versus popular uses of archaeological images, particularly in the promotion of large-scale scientific or national projects to the public (120). Such photography, including later, picturesque color images of sites such as Pompeii in Italy and Roman ruins at Dugga, Tunisia, are placed between archaeological and artistic photographies (127–31).

This seeming dichotomy of archaeological versus art images (described by the “at”/“through” narrative of the introduction) is the concern of the book’s last chapter. Here Bohrer points to several photographers, some working explicitly within archaeological contexts, and others working more externally with the ideas of archaeology. Some scholars, Bohrer contends, are confused by the beauty of archaeological images, as such aesthetics would seem out of place within a scientific archaeological protocol (150). Others see artful manipulations as part of rendering the beauty inherent in archaeological objects. (Bohrer cites scholarship on Alison Frantz, the archaeologist and prolific photographer who worked in Greece in the mid-twentieth century, as such an example; see 152.) Lastly, Bohrer notes more contemporary photographers whose work directly takes up the historiography of archaeology or its links to archival behaviors, though they are not themselves associated with any traditional archaeological research; Marilyn Bridges, Duane Michaels, Jeff Wall, Victor Burgin, and especially Patrick Nagatani are examined by way of concluding the chapter and the book as a whole (153–68).

Overall, Photography and Archaeology successfully raises many interesting issues in the intersection of the fields it studies. The book is a good introduction to both archaeological and photographic history that has seen growth in recent years, and the notes (though these might be considered somewhat slim for an academic monograph) and bibliography will be good points of entry to students and scholars looking for ways into these histories. One wishes there might have been a clearer distinction throughout the book of Bohrer’s definition of an archaeological photograph (as opposed to travel photography, architectural photography, etc.), or acknowledgment of the difficulty of categorizing images of the “archaeological” as a whole. One might also have hoped for an additional chapter or distinct conclusion summarizing the political aspects of archaeology and its photography. While touched upon throughout the book, there is a burgeoning literature about this topic that could have been usefully surveyed. These include considerations of archaeological work and its imaging carried out by local practitioners across the Mediterranean, Asia, and Americas that focus on the “home-grown” perspective, rather than the outside/Euro-American incursions into these regions (see work by Christopher Pinney on India [The Coming of Photography in India, London: British Library, 2008] [click here for review]; Yannis Hamalakis for Greece [The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009]; and essays in the volume Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, edited by Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem for Turkey [Istanbul: SALT, 2011] [click here for review]). However, as a contribution to the “Exposures” series and a first step in summarizing the field to date, this is an excellent point of entry.