ABSTRACT

Any archaeologist can call a diversity of categories of landscape to mind. Human life and human memory would surely be strange yardsticks to apply to the nonhuman past – the trace, the remnant, the ruin with which so many believe we are confronted in the archaeological past. Photography is one form of archaeology’s dislocated knowledge of the past. Modern archaeology emerged hand in hand with photography from the 1830s. The photograph and the body operate in the same register, such that memory and landscape constitute a visual mode of thinking. The collapse of immediacy and distance that the archaeological image brings is captured by W.G. Sebald’s commentary on Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia. A photological perspective reveals that the photograph not as remnant or trace but as an unfinished trick of the light, as a visual mode of knowledge.