The New Antiquity

Living for the first time in an ancient city on a Rome Prize Fellowship, Tim Davis began to notice a shift in attention when looking at archeological sites. He then took that forceful change in significance to parts of the city that are not so well documented. The photographs in The New Antiquity were made over five years, in the suburbs of great and ancient capitals, in Italy and China, and then along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They portray a world where layers of time are collapsed. Places of great antitquity turn up on digital camera screens and sugar packets and in front of apartment blocks. New buildings and structures and objects seem to be decaying into what Davis calls "a soon to be ancient past." People appear, but they are difficult to place in time. There are red herrings: pictures that look like archaeology, but might just be the side of the road. And there are places of real ancientness, but seen without romance, as living things. Intended as a complex an open-ended work of "creative non-fiction," the pictures in this book, made with a large-format view camera, are both beautifully clear and vehemently obscure.