December 5, 2011 – February 24, 2012
This exhibition of photographs presents a powerful visual narrative of the cultures, conflicts and conquests that forged the New World. Covering significant ruins in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, Lost Worlds offers a unique pictorial survey of the geographical, architectural and historical diversity that defines the Americas.
Seeking to broaden the vision that inspired him to create American Ruins (traveling exhibition and publication by Merrell 2007), the first photographic survey of historic ruins within the United States, photographer and writer Arthur Drooker continues his journey making images of ruins that shed light on the collective identity of the Americas.
After conducting extensive research, Drooker identified, traveled to, and photographed thirty-three ruins in fifteen countries over a three-year period. They range from iconic UNESCO World Heritage Sites to places that are less well known but no less worthy. They include a king’s palace in Haiti, Inca fortresses in Peru, Maya pyramids in Mexico, and a colonial city in Panama sacked by legendary pirates.
Drooker photographed each site with a specially adapted digital infrared camera. Infrared photography records an invisible band of light that envelops ruins in an otherworldly glow.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT: ARTHUR DROOKER
Photographing ruins merges my passions for history and photography. I'm drawn to these sites to commune with those who came before us, preserve what they left behind, and restore what they've built to our collective memory. In this act of creation, I confront my own mortality and become most alive.
I have three criteria for selecting these sites: They have to be preserved as historic ruins; they must make a distinctive architectural and geographic contribution to the series; and they should be suitable subjects for infrared photography, a medium that best evokes their inherent mystery.
Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but I use a specially adapted 35 mm digital camera to record it. Infrared's ethereal effect illuminates the otherworldly atmosphere that haunts ruins, allowing a photographer to transcend mere documentation and capture the elegiac beauty of crumbled walls, weathered facades and broken arches as no other format can.
In making these images, I expand on a tradition established by pioneering photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Claude Joseph Desire Charnay and William James Stillman, who first brought images of antiquities to the public. Now it’s my turn, using technology they never could have imagined, to respond to a question posed in 1855 by Abel Fletcher, a writer for the Photographic and Fine Art Journal. His query, a plea really, seems just as relevant now as it did then:
“Are not these monuments of former ages calling upon us, as artists, to come and secure their shadows by the pencil ray of Heaven, ere their crumbling forms shall pass away forever?”
The above was from http://lostworldsbook.com/photostate.html
Artwork pictured is ŠAMA | Art Museum of the Americas (OAS). All rights reserved.
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
IP Address: 3.145.2.184 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
") are described as follows: