Paper short abstract:

This paper is about how archaeology and photography share similar properties especially when it comes to exploring ideas concerning extent (space) and duration (time).

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about how archaeology and photography share similar properties especially when it comes to exploring ideas concerning extent (space) and duration (time).

Archaeology deals with what's left of movement, of being alive. It excavates 'the incline that matter descends' (Bergson 1911). Bizarrely, archaeology is often perceived of as a discipline that produces flat and quiescent representations of past events - a series of spatial snapshots as opposed to lived histories.

Early photography was the same in that its long-drawn-out exposure times could only register what survived of movement, but not movement itself. Yet its very inability to capture movement made it all the more precise in its ability to reveal the inert. Its focus, its depth of field, was highly sensitive to inanimate things (buildings and artefacts) which it reproduced at extraordinary resolution. Even as photographic technology advanced, and its capability to arrest movement improved, time was still involved in the production of an image - the photograph was still a composite of extent and duration.

Theorising photography, the photographic process, is our way of thinking differently about archaeology. It is our opinion that neither discipline produces flat quiescent representations of past events.