Porch of the Maidens (Asomaton) After Yannis Tsarouchis and Henri Cartier-Bresson 2022
gelatin silver print on fibre based paper
38 x 37.5 cm
Ed 5 + 1 AP
Darkroom prints by Sandy Barnard
This multiple exposure image links the two modern caryatids that support the porch of a small house at 45 Agion Asomaton Street in the Athenian suburban neighborhood of Psyrri, and the six ancient marble caryatids that originally supported the 5th c. BCE Porch of the Maidens of the Erechtheion Temple on the nearby Athenian acropolis.
The Asomaton caryatids are famous in contemporary Athens as are their much older sisters. Today five of the older sisters stand together in the Athens Acropolis Museum and one stands alone in the British Museum in London.
The Asomaton caryatids have captured the imagination of Greek and foreign artists alike. Yannis Tsarouchis rendered them in gouache in 1964 and Henri Cartier-Bresson famously photographed two old women wearing black walking beneath them in 1953. In making this photograph Hazewinkel has tried to help move the relationship between the photography and archaeology into a new territory, one inhabited by ghosts that remind us again and again that distant and remote pasts surround us and remain vibrantly alive in all of us.
