Porch of the Maidens (Asomaton) 2022
After Yannis Tsarouchis and Henri Cartier-Bresson
Gelatin silver print on fibre based paper
38 x 37.5 cm
Ed 5 + 1 AP
This multiple exposure image draws out associations between the two modern caryatids that support the porch of a small house at 45 Agion Asomaton Street in the Athenian inner 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 modern Asomaton caryatids are famous in contemporary Athens, as are their six much older sisters. Five of the older sisters today stand together in the Acropolis Museum and one stands alone, displaced 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 I have 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 remain vibrantly alive in all of us.
