AFLOAT | The Shifting Landscapes of Delos through the eyes of Erieta Attali

 

Indeed, no sooner had photography been invented in the Nineteenth century than it became a key tool for archaeologists, recording the layers progressively revealing ancient civilizations from architectural fragments and traces on the ground.

But for Attali to make images of an archaeological site goes far beyond literal documentation to capturing a topographical vision, extending often to the horizon, or even on the open sea and the sense it gives us of the curvature of the earth. Attali’s photographs are as much of the sites recorded as they are about the spirit in which the ancients occupied these islands.

Siting was as important as orderly structure in the conception of ancient Greek temples and theaters; and Attali is attentive both to the larger situation of ancient sites and to the rhythms of surviving structures, both in fragments and in the patterns of their shadows. To honor Apollo, the god of the sun, and for Artemis, his twin sister, goddess of moonlight, the temple site was to connect earth and cosmos, the temporal to the eternal.

Both daylight and moonlight are recorded in Attali’s images. But those very different luminosities are equally the very means of the images’s creation: “photography” a practice and a word invented in the 19th century from Greek roots: to draw with light.

In five campaigns over more than a year (September 2022 to October 2023) Attali took hundreds of images, from which the sixteen panoramas in the exhibition capture the interaction of both sun and moonlight on the Cycladic islands where temples address not only the land on which archaeologists dig but the sweep of the horizon and the glistening of the sea.