Andrew Hazewinkel

The practice of archaeology and the practice of photography have a long and complex relationship. This exhibition, and the body of work that it presents, aims to bring fresh ways of looking at and thinking about their much studied relationships, and it also asks us to reconsider conceptions of authority in relation to text and image.

The Greek word for monument - μνημεío (mnimeío) shares its origins with the word for memory – μνήμη (mními), and it is in this way that the flickering, fleeting, ephemeral is always there in the background of the monumental and its allusions to permanence and power.

P.P. Pasolini decried the notion that monuments and grand sanctioned sweeping narratives (themselves monuments of a sort) are the way that history is recorded. Rather, he favored the records of the flickering and fleeting, the ephemeral everyday occurrences which he termed lucciole - fireflies.

In the winter of 2021, the Athenian air was uncharacteristically clear. A rare coalescence between reduced traffic flows, silenced industry (courtesy of Covid quarantines), and heavy snowfalls that came that year with polar storms sweeping down from the North, cleansed the skies of light diffusing particles. As the air changed so too did the light.

The images in this exhibition were captured during that winter. In the coldest hour, the hour before the sun rises. Working with a series of limitations - the lightspace that separates night from day, the F-stop and aperture capabilities of the 1970’s Hassleblad C500 camera that I shoot film on, the Covid related curfews and movement restrictions - I created these images in the empty, silent, typically tourist teeming archaeological sites in the centre of Athens. In layered spectral states they flicker in and out of solidity, as they tease out the accretive relationships we unconsciously form with the places we live in. Ghosts appear and disappear, reappearing again and again, palimpsests of individual experience, desire, love, loss, hope, pouring unconsciously into our exquiste mess of collective memory.


The following is a text I wrote to accompany the exhibition.


GHOSTS ARE GOOD COMPANY WHEN MEDITATING ON MONUMENTS AND REMEMBERING

This text addresses the ramifying relationships between monuments of remote pasts and our contemporary world. It unfolds the ideas, emotions and experiences that were present at the making of the 10 multiple-exposure gelatin silver photographs that constitute the series Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams, which I created between 2020 – 2023. Under the headings of Ghosts, Light, Dualisms, Monuments, Remembering, Fromness, Limits, and Appreciation, the following experimental passages – at times poetic, personal, photographically technical, and philosophical - aim less to explain the images rather they aim to illuminate the atmospheres - physical, emotional, psychological, social, and supernatural - in which the images were made. Several of the passages arrive you, the reader, at a question which is intentionally left unanswered in the hope that it endures, hovering in your mind, as a kind of prompt to thinking differently about images and the activities we call photography.

GHOSTS

The first medium format camera I owned was a Mamiya RZ67. I purchased it second hand. In its previous life it was a Sydney Crime Squad camera and I have never been able to shake the idea (and the imaging implications) associated with the question - what if the dark chamber in which photographic film receives light has some form of memory? This is my way into thinking about spatially informed spectrality, which some may call a haunting.

The second medium format camera I purchased, again second hand, is the camera that I worked with to capture the images that feature in this exhibition - a Hasselblad 500 C/M paired with a Zeiss Distagon 50mm f/4 lens. In its previous life it belonged to a Finnish master darkroom printer named Asko, who everyone involved in the analogue photographic community of Australia knows of and respects. Before Asko sold me his camera we spent many hours, over several projects, printing together in the darkroom. I have been working with Asko’s camera for about a decade now, during which I have often grappled with another unshakeable question – can light be haunted? This is my way into thinking about personally informed spectrality, which some may call a haunting.

The past lives of the two medium format cameras that I have worked with over the past 20 years have shaped my thinking about hauntings, in physical and psychological contexts, and their intergenerational, cultural, spatial, and technological dimensions. In various ways the following passages are all connected with the work and the exhibition. I hope that they reveal the hauntings that were present during the making of the work, and I hope that those hauntings remain in the work, between its layered tonalities, overlapping shadows and at times juddering compositions.

LIGHT

Solaris, Stanisław Lem’s 1961 science fiction novel which Andrei Tarkovsky’s exquisite 1972 film Solaris is based on, transports the reader to a distant planet that is covered by a living sentient ocean. The ocean seems to be the only inhabitant of the planet. Soon after the arrival of a human researcher who has come to investigate a series of sinister psychological phenomena affecting other earthlings on the nearby orbiting research station, they discover that the sentient ocean has the ability to read people’s minds, to infiltrate their subconscious, and to materialize their most shameful and innermost experiences, and fears. (Bevlov, 2023) The ocean is haunting people. It gathers information as it infiltrates their buried pasts, and it feeds that information back into their immediate presents, and in this way, it gives form to their futures. This brings me to another question concerning spectrality - might light have the same capabilities as Lem’s sentient ocean?

DUALISMS

Although this is not central to the thinking behind this body of work, its title Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams recalls philosopher G. Ryle’s challenge to what he perceived as the mind/body problem inherent to Cartesian dualism.  Pivotal to Cartesian dualism is the idea that the mind (perceived as private) and body (perceived as public) exist in polar opposition. In his ground-breaking 1949 book The Concept of Mind, Ryle coined the expression ‘the Ghost in the Machine’ with which he highlights the categorical mistake of considering ghost (mind), and machine (body) as being the same kind of thing, thus he hammered home ‘the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism’. (Tanney, 2021)

In the lexicon of the Rylian / Cartesian philosophical dispute, the title of this body of work, would be Mind Sensations / Body Dreams, which is a kind of counter-intuitive play with paradox that mingles substances and aesthetic experience. Here (and elsewhere in what follows) when I use the term aesthetic, I am not referring to conceptions of style, or matters of taste, rather to the term’s much older, deeper meaning, which comes down to us from its origins which are rooted in the ancient Greek word ‘aisthtikόs’ αισθητικός meaning ‘perceptible by the senses.’  (Gibson, 2015, p.91)

MONUMENTS

My spectral musings on the past lives of my RZ67 and my 500 C/M have brought me to the understanding that ghosts are good company when meditating on monuments and their relationship with remembering, which is what this body of work does. Ghosts skirt around the Rylian / Cartesian dispute because they are presences, bound neither by body nor mind, rather they are comingled residuum of both.

The exhibition Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams is comprised of ten images. Two images were captured at each of five archaeological sites in central Athens that typically teem with tourists. These images were made in the predawn light of the first winter of movement restrictions associated with the recent pandemic, as the monumental ghosts stood in stoic silence reminding us of our own ephemerality. Every night throughout the pandemic the deserted city’s monuments remained spectacularly lit, perhaps intentionally they became beacons of continuance and endurance. With each sunrise the lights were turned off. I captured them just before they assumed their metaphoric daylight darkness.

During the winter of 2020/21, the Athenian air was uncharacteristically clear. Reduced traffic flows, silenced industry, and the heavy snowfalls that came with polar storms that swept down from the north cooperatively cleansed the sky of heavy metals and other light diffusing particles. As the air quality changed, so too did the light. The clarity of the light made the tonal range of everything seem wider. It made the predawn light clearer, and it made the sunrise seem slower. On a cloudless morning the transition from the first blush of light to clear definition of form lasted about one hour, on a cloudy morning it lasted a little longer. In this context I had to work fast. Preparatory visits to the locations I intended to shoot from enabled me to plan as much as possible. Then, on the morning of each shoot I set out on foot at around 04.30 and started shooting around 05:00 and finishing about 06:15 before returning home.

REMEMBERING

Ghosts and hauntings are caught up in remembering. Considering their entanglement always recalls one of my favorite quotes about remembering and remembrance by the writer, poet, artist, and friend Ross Gibson - ‘Remembrance’ is a bodily word drawn from two roots – ‘memor’: to be mindful; and ‘membrum’: a limb. When you remember, you put a body back together by coordinating some disaggregated, wasted, or severed members. You re-member a dis-membered thing. You organize thoughts and feelings. With remembrance you become mindful in the present by bringing component parts of some past body of experience or significance back together in your sense-supplied cognition. And having remembered, you ask yourself, does this thing hold firm now’. (Gibson, 2015, p.10)

One of the photographs in the series, Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams 6 (Acropolis of Athens B), was captured the day of my father’s funeral - 18th November 2020. I was not there. The timing implications of the sometimes-cruel closure of Australia’s territorial borders at that time meant that I couldn’t be there. I had decided not to watch my father’s funeral streamed in real-time from afar, but that morning I woke earlier than usual, so I went online, and I clicked the link that my elder brother had sent me. I still remember the strange, dislocating image on-screen of my two brothers, my two sisters and some of my nieces and nephews sunk in deep grief in chairs arranged in a slightly curving line in front of my father’s coffin, which was also in the frame. I may have added this detail to my memory, but in my recalled image of father’s funeral there was an empty chair in frame left for me. When the service ended and my family left for our father’s burial, I went to one of my favorite places in Athens, to sit between the trees on the Pynx, a wooded rise opposite the Acropolis. I took my camera kit without really knowing why. As I walked through the darkness to reach my favorite spot, I started to recall fragmented childhood memories of my father transforming the bathroom of our family home into a makeshift darkroom. When I arrived at my favorite spot, I took the already loaded camera out of its bag and started shooting.

Ghost Sensations / Machine Dreams 6 (Acropolis of Athens B) is the lightest image of the series. This is partly because I had set out later than usual, but I cannot help thinking that its ‘lightness’ is connected somehow with my father. The image reminds me of the silent, empty, devasted scenes that sometimes arrive at the end of a long battle. It has what might be described as an epic quality. In the center of the image there are two faint marks that at first may seem like printing errors. They are the in fact the first birds to fly in that morning’s sky. I finished the roll and didn’t reload. I just sat there among the trees, my face wet with tears and farewelled my father. It felt epic, and beautiful, and right. I sat there for many hours, watching birds and remembering. 

FROMNESS

I have made my home a city where if you ask someone ‘where are you from?’ they will tell you the name of the island or village that their mother is from, and the name of the island or village that their father is from. Rarely is it the same island or village. They will often then ask if I have been to their mother’s island or their father’s village. Sometimes my answer is yes, which brings a beautiful blend of surprise and joy to their eyes. If my answer is no what usually follows is a description of the physical landscape, sometimes with poetic descriptions of its light, or the hardness of its mountains; but it always comes with an explanation of its connections with recent and remote pasts, often through stories that link the place back to antiquity. These people ‘know’ and feel a special love for where they are from.

A few years ago in Heraklion, a man I was close to said to me one evening out of the blue ‘you’re a really weird guy’… to which I replied with surprise ‘why’… and he replied, ‘because you don’t feel any connection to where you’re from’. Perhaps he is right, I’m still not sure…but his statement has given rise to another question I can’t seem to shake is - does coming from a place make you of that place?

LIMITS

These images were made with Kodak T-max film, pushed 2 stops in the processing. There were made without a tripod on my Hasselblad 500 C/M which has a relatively short f-stop range. To make the images that I had in my mind required me to work at the limits of the film, the camera, and the circumstances that I was confronted with.  Almost all the images are multiple exposures at f/4, occasionally at f/5.6. The number of exposures varies, but the range of exposures is between 5 exposures at 1/30th of a second and 15 exposures at 1/60th of a second. Working at the imaging limits of the film and the camera seemed both pragmatic and poetic in its mirroring of humanity’s collective response to what we were all dealing with at the time. A kind of collective recalibration toward finding new ways of tackling the psychological, emotional, and physical limitations that were pressing against us.

APPRECIATION

Over the past four years the Nordic Library at Athens is the place where I have researched and developed my projects before manifesting them artistically in the studio or in the wider lifeworld.  The Nordic Library is a joint venture between the archaeological institutes of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. I remain a grateful recipient of one of their four dedicated research offices. The library is welcomingly open to the public, many of its readers are Greek and Nordic scholars working in ancient Greek religion, classics reception and the archaeology of SE Mediterranean Basin, but this community is an ever-morphing shapeshifter. It is not unusual to encounter a judge seeking a quiet space to work through a case, or a young scholar /soldier doing his national service, or the occasional script writer, novelist, anthropologist or even more occasionally another artist.

Whenever I am introduced to someone new to the library I am introduced as ‘our resident Australian’. This is not surprising as my colleagues know that I was born and raised in Australia. However, with a respectful nod toward what I have come to understand as a contemporary Greek way of explaining (intergenerationally) where one is from, I explain that my family is from the Netherlands, that both my mother and father are from the same southern region of the low countries, and that yes, I was born and raised in Australia. Each time I hear those kindly delivered words ‘our resident Australian’, I hear a voice in my head and heart saying, ‘am I that?’ And I to begin to wonder again what cultural ghosts dwell deep within our genes and what form of stimuli might arouse them to activity in our individual aesthetic realms



REFERENCES

Bevlov, I. (2023) Lem Vs. Tarkovsky: The Fight Over ‘Solaris’.
Available at http://culture.pl/en/article/lem-vs-tarkovsky-the-fight-over-solaris , last updated, November 2023, accessed 12/4/2025.

Gibson, R. (2015) Memoryscopes: Remnants Forensics Aesthetics, 1st edn. Crawley: UWA Publishing.The University of Western Australia.

Tanney, J. (2207) Gilbert Ryle. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/ Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published December 2007, substantive revision May 2021, accessed 11/5/25.