The New World's Old World.

The New World's Old World. Photographic Views of Ancient America. Edited by May Castleberry. With essays by May Castleberry, Georgia de Havenon, Kathleen Stewart Howe, Edward Ranney, and Martha A. Sandweiss. University Of New Mexico Press, 2003. 280 pp., illustrated throughout, 9,5x8,75".

Book description:

" 'The New World's Old World: Photographic Views of Ancient America' showcases the remarkable work of photographers who have captured the archaeological landscapes of ancient American cultures from the dawn of photography to the current day.

Through essays and descriptive entries on specific sites, the volume demonstrates how photography serves science by conserving structures and masterpieces of the Americas' past, in addition to being an independent artistic medium.

Included are works by nineteenth century explorers such as Désiré Charnay, William Henry Jackson, and Timothy O'Sullivan; scientific documentation by Alfred Maudslay; modernist visions by Josef Albers, Martín Chambi, Edward Weston, and Laura Gilpin; contemporary work by Marilyn Bridges, Javier Hinojosa, and Edward Ranney.

Their photographs and essays reflect a diversity of approaches. Most of the places shown here have been inhabited continuously since contact or rebuilt over ancient sites. Where some nineteenth-century photographers uncovered jumbles of stone smothered in vegetation, their successors contemplated sites altered by excavation, restoration, earthquakes and floods, vandalism, and the encroachment of settlements that obscure or obliterate ancient structures."