Porch of the Maidens (Asomaton) 2022
After Yannis Tsarouchis and Henri Cartier-Bresson
Gelatin silver print on fibre based paper
38 x 37.5 cm
Ed 5 + 1 AP
This multiple exposure image connects two modern caryatids, that support the porch of a small house on Asomaton Street in the Athenian inner suburban neighborhood of Psyrri, with the six ancient marble caryatids that support the 5th c. BCE Porch of the Maidens of the Erechtheion Temple on the nearby Athenian acropolis.
The modern Asomaton figures are famous in contemporary Athens, as are their six much older sisters. Five of the older sisters stand together in the Acropolis Museum and one stands alone, displaced in the British Museum in London. The Asomaton caryatids have captured the imagination of Greek artists and foreign artists visiting Greece, - Yannis Tsarouchis rendered they exquisitely in loose gouache and Henri Cartier- Bresson photographed two old women wearing black walking beneath them. In making this photograph I have tried to help move the long established and well documented relationship between the photography and archaeology into a new territory, one inhabited by ghosts that remind us again and again that distant and remote pasts remain vibrantly alive in all of us.