1JZGauQ

1: INTRODUCTION
itioned somewhere in between a visual ethnographic commentary and
artwork (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009:288–289). According to
Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos the problem with the way that photography
has traditionally been viewed in archaeology is as a “faithful,
disembodied representation of reality” (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos
2009: 283). Instead they suggest that photographs should be seen more as
a material artefact and as a mnemonic, “[i]n other words they are memories,
that is reworked renderings of the things they have witnessed. They
do not represent but rather recall. They do not show, but rather evoke. As
such, they are material mnemonics, and as all memory, they are reworkings
of the past, not a faithful reproduction of it” (Hamilakis and
Anagnostopoulos 2009:289). For me the photographs are an important
part of my work not because of their differences to the text but rather
their similarities to it. It is through the interaction with the material
through site visits and again through the photographs that I have taken
that this thesis has taken shape. It is also through the interaction of both
text and photographs that these pages have been created.
Archaeologists Þora Pétursdottír and Bjørnar Olsen (forthcoming) have
discussed the relationship between text and images and suggest that
photographs are often seen as more biased than text. They mean that
photographs are often considered a supplement and instead they argue that
photographs should be seen as an engagement with the material. Discussing
the aesthetic aspects of ruined photographs they describe the aesthetic
experience as a prelinguistic condition which can be described as “an immediate
reaction to confrontation with reality” (Olsen and Pétursdottír,
forthcoming). Although I started photographing as documentation during
my fieldwork it became so much more than this. It became an extension of
the bodily engagement with the material that I came across. Some of the
photos in this thesis are more of documentary character while others may
seem more art-like. There has been a lot of criticism both within as well as
outside the archaeological field of the more art-like aesthetic style photos
(see Olsen and Pétursdottír, forthcoming) but this may also depends on
who is taking the photographs. Photographer Angus Boulton’s film and
photographs of Forst Zinna (2007), a Soviet military base in former East
Germany, has received a lot of positive feedback. Although speaking about
moving images Harrison and Schofield discuss Boulton’s film of the Forst
Zinna site where they describe how he captures the feeling of the place and
its abandonment, and although they suggest Boulton uses techniques that
are not all that different from traditional archaeological and building
27