The Hidden Columns of Rome
A collaboration with Selena Anders
2018 - 2021
photography, black and white negative film
When I settled in Rome, I was deeply drawn to the richly ornamented walls of the historic city. They are captivating in their abundance of detail and spolia—an immersive diversity of embedded ancient remnants, inscriptions, cornices, capitals, and columns, alongside decaying frescoes, statues, madonnelle, and Catholic plaques. Many of these fragments of Antiquity and the Middle Ages remain unmarked, often unnoticed and unfamiliar even to historians.
I chose to focus my work on columns because of their active presence at street level, their proximity to people, and their interaction with everyday urban life. As markers of endurance within culture, these columns exist within the flow of rapid change. Their striking diversity in size, style, and state of preservation also calls for careful visual documentation. For centuries, ancient columns have been removed from their original locations and incorporated as independent, enduring elements into later buildings. Today, their relative inconspicuousness within a city that functions as an open-air museum places them among posters, signs, vehicles, and even garbage bags. As anonymous, timeless, and silent witnesses to history, they embody an urban expression of how the past survives and imperceptibly permeates the present.
Since 2018, I have systematically walked the streets of the historic city within the Aurelian Walls, identifying more than seventy locations marked by unique columns. I created a map and have returned repeatedly to these sites, photographing them under varying light conditions and within the shifting rhythms of urban life. Considering time—not transparency—as the central subject of black-and-white photography, I chose to work with black-and-white film in order to evoke the distant origins and timeless presence of these columns. This approach allows me to depict their urban context without emphasizing its transient states.
I adopted an observational, almost old-fashioned documentary approach, using a 35mm camera to express my sense of the columns’ quiet, restrained participation in street life. In doing so, I also pay homage to the great masters of flâneur photography, while engaging with a significant historical layer of the medium—much like the columns themselves reveal enduring layers of history.
In 2019, after a year of work, Prof. Hendrik Dey drew my attention to the PhD thesis of Prof. Selena Anders, “Medieval Porticoes of Rome: New Methods and Technologies for Revealing Rome’s Architectural and Urban Heritage,” and shared her contact with me. Her extensive research on remnant columns—once used as spolia in medieval porticoes and later enclosed within walls—shed new light on the locations I had identified on my map.
Through this shared interest, and a mutual sensitivity to the customs of urban space, Selena Anders and I developed a productive dialogue that led to a number of compelling ideas, which are currently in the process of being exhibited and published.