Photography may have roots much older than its 155-year history, a clever exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art suggests. “An Eye for Antiquity,” on loan from the Tampa Museum of Art, is 80 photographs from the eclectic collection of nearly 3,000 amassed by Mr. and Mrs. William Zewadski, who, after acquiring classical Greek and southern Italian vases, turned their passion for collecting to photographs on Greco-Roman themes. And perhaps the Zewadskis’ shift from acquiring antiquities to acquiring the photographic record of antiquity is not so odd: it does reflect a trend in the technology of collecting. With a camera, everyone can collect, immaterially. Nineteenth-century travelers collected “views,” or “perspectives,” made at first by professionals, then increasingly by amateurs. The thrill of being there and bagging a monument with your very own lens soon ranked in authenticity with any collectible.
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The Smart Museum opens and closes this exhibit with fragments from its own collection of antiquities, cleverly bracketing the photographs with reminders of the obsession with piecing together the past shared by collectors, curators, and photographers. Worn stone heads, a hoof, and a finger point us to the galleries that catalog this encounter between the oldest of collectibles and the newest collector: antiquity meets photography.
The pace the exhibit sets is brisk: moving through the 19th century is like flipping the pages of an old picture book that is still strangely current. The show’s most memorable moments come from a 19th-century volume containing German-Italian Giorgio Sommer’s haunting photographs of excavated corpses petrified by volcanic lava at Pompeii. These images rewrite the history of atrocity photography, to which 20th-century viewers are painfully accustomed. There is nothing bloody about these plaster bodies lying on wood stretchers or on the ground; they seem more likely to await sculptors than paramedics. But their positions are frightful, forecasts of the torments we could all face at our end. These casts were formed from emptiness, from abscesses within the Pompeian rock. Archaeologists packed plaster into the pockets so that these “survivors” might be rescued–no doubt to reside in the suspended animation of museums. In their bare, almost abstract humanity, these are the ancestors of the figures worked by modern sculptors from Giacometti to Abakanowitz. To the perfect marble bodies dreamed by sculptors of Greece’s Golden Age, these are the nightmare. What curious things to collect.
