Greece as Photograph

In 1941 Alison Frantz and Lucy Talcott, archaeologists and members of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, published an illustrated book for ‘the benefit of civilian aid’ in occupied Greece. Not surprisingly, given the philhellene rhetoric of the previous century with which the editors and their acolytes had been nurtured, the modestly produced but not so modestly entitled publication This is Greece proposed a black-and-white panorama that romanticised Greekness as an idealisation of ancestral heritage. Contributed by 75 members of the School and associated friends, the 140 photographs of ancient stones and Byzantine monuments, of bucolic scenery and peasant life, of indigenous architecture and customs, of stern priests and joyful girls in local costume that feature in the publication do not seem to be informed by a uniform style of image-making, other than the enthusiasm and curiosity of the amateur photographer. However, conceptually they seem to subscribe to the same idea outlined in the brief introduction of the book that ‘in Greece past and present [are] separated by no very wide gulf, whether in ideals of democracy and independence or in the daily occupations of country people’ (Frantz and Talcott 1941: n.p.). The editors’ knowledgeable ethnographic-in-style captions and meticulous selection of ancient verses only aim to accentuate the above thesis in the loosely organised thematic categories of the book. ² For instance, the caption under the photograph of a Macedonian woman threshing notes: ‘In modern as in ancient times threshing is done by means of a horse or ox-drawn sled, the tribola, a heavy wooden slab, set with sharp stones for cutting the straw and separating the grain’ (Frantz and Talcott 1941: 77). On the following page, a more skilled photograph of farmers winnowing somewhere in Corinth is accompanied by a verse selected from Hesiod’s Work and Days (571–608): ‘Set your slaves to winnow Demeter’s holy grain, when strong Orion first appears, on a smooth threshing floor in an airy place’ (Frantz and Talcott 1941: 78). What Frantz and Talcott put together as a representative image of Greece for circulation in Europe and the United States would be very much the thematic norm of the mainstream tourist guides to be published in the succeeding decades.