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, Albuquerque, 2003. 280 pp., 78 duotones, 9½x8¾".

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. May Castleberry is the editor of a series of artist's books published by The Museum of Modern Art. She has organized the Whitney Museum's exhibition, "Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West," and its accompanying catalogue. Kathleen Howe is Curator of Prints and Photographs, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Martha A. Sandweiss is professor of American studies and history, Amherst College, Amherst, MA. She was previously Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX. Edward Ranney has been internationally recognized for his photographs of pre-Columbian art and architecture. He resides in Santa Fe, NM. Georgia de Havenon is an art historian whose fields of study range from Andean textiles to comic books. Active in the preservation of Bolivian archaeological sites, she is the coauthor of Krazy Kat: The Art of George Herriman.
Every other season (or so it seems) a great title that slips past me and heads out into the world unannounced through our pages. The New World's Old World, published by the University of New Mexico Press, appears on that short list and cries to be duly noted. The book surveys photographers who have imaged the ancient, archaeological sites of the New World; the largest concentration of such sites is found in the American Southwest, Mexico, Central America, and the Andean Region of South America. The list of contributors is thorough, beginning with a slew of adventurers in the 19th century and continuing up through Ed Ranney and Linda Connor in modern times. Ranney (photo at right) is of particular interest, having photographed sites in the Andean area for nearly 40 years. His contribution includes an essay entitled "Images of a Sacred Geography," in which he notes "the tendency among some contemporary photographers to work at ancient sites for their expressive potential rather than their inherent cultural associations."

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