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1: INTRODUCTION<br />
itioned somewhere in between a visual ethnographic commentary and<br />
artwork (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009:288–289). According to<br />
Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos the problem with the way that photography<br />
has traditionally been viewed in archaeology is as a “faithful,<br />
disembodied representation of reality” (Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos<br />
2009: 283). Instead they suggest that photographs should be seen more as<br />
a material artefact and as a mnemonic, “[i]n other words they are memories,<br />
that is reworked renderings of the things they have witnessed. They<br />
do not represent but rather recall. They do not show, but rather evoke. As<br />
such, they are material mnemonics, and as all memory, they are reworkings<br />
of the past, not a faithful reproduction of it” (Hamilakis and<br />
Anagnostopoulos 2009:289). For me the photographs are an important<br />
part of my work not because of their differences to the text but rather<br />
their similarities to it. It is through the interaction with the material<br />
through site visits and again through the photographs that I have taken<br />
that this thesis has taken shape. It is also through the interaction of both<br />
text and photographs that these pages have been created.<br />
Archaeologists Þora Pétursdottír and Bjørnar Olsen (forthcoming) have<br />
discussed the relationship between text and images and suggest that<br />
photographs are often seen as more biased than text. They mean that<br />
photographs are often considered a supplement and instead they argue that<br />
photographs should be seen as an engagement with the material. Discussing<br />
the aesthetic aspects of ruined photographs they describe the aesthetic<br />
experience as a prelinguistic condition which can be described as “an immediate<br />
reaction to confrontation with reality” (Olsen and Pétursdottír,<br />
forthcoming). Although I started photographing as documentation during<br />
my fieldwork it became so much more than this. It became an extension of<br />
the bodily engagement with the material that I came across. Some of the<br />
photos in this thesis are more of documentary character while others may<br />
seem more art-like. There has been a lot of criticism both within as well as<br />
outside the archaeological field of the more art-like aesthetic style photos<br />
(see Olsen and Pétursdottír, forthcoming) but this may also depends on<br />
who is taking the photographs. Photographer Angus Boulton’s film and<br />
photographs of Forst Zinna (2007), a Soviet military base in former East<br />
Germany, has received a lot of positive feedback. Although speaking about<br />
moving images Harrison and Schofield discuss Boulton’s film of the Forst<br />
Zinna site where they describe how he captures the feeling of the place and<br />
its abandonment, and although they suggest Boulton uses techniques that<br />
are not all that different from traditional archaeological and building<br />
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