Jen Baird & Sophie Hay – Archaeology and Photography

Data evento
17 Settembre 2025

This conversation is presented as part of the public programming for the exhibition Women and Ruins: Archaeology, Photography, and Landscape on show at the Academy until November 9, 2025.
Photography aided in the formation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and participated in the transformations of how people saw the world around them. In the final years of the Grand Tour, photography became increasingly available as a technology. Tourists made and acquired photographs of the sites they visited and the people they visited them with. A rising interest in analyzing sites, and excavating them to understand them better, prompted new methods of recording such as scale drawing and photography. Film photographs famously have the quality of appearing to be a simple indexical record of what was before the camera, and yet photography can equally be open to experimentation and innovation.
Along with its role in reshaping thinking about archaeological facts, early photography captures the social relationships at archaeological sites. Photographs from major excavation projects, such as those at Rome, Pompeii and elsewhere in the ancient world, capture images of workers who are otherwise unknown, reflect paradigms and norms designed by the photographer, who set up the tableau of the photograph. Women often took up the camera. As the exhibition Women and Ruins makes clear, women of the early twentieth century used photography, and photography of archaeology, distinctively.
This evening’s event brings together two archaeologists who have examined the use of photography in early archaeology. They will each give a short lecture on how the technology prompted new ways of thinking about evidence in the study of the human past, and the particular role played by women in photography. By comparing various contexts where photography played a critical role in excavation and documentation, from Dura Europos to Pompeii, scholars Jen Baird and Sophie Hay will interrogate the relationships between the two fields within the framework of new ideas about gender and women’s independence.

Jen Baird 

Trouble Focusing: Looking for Women in the Archaeological Photography of the Middle East 

Drawing on archaeological photographs of and by women in the Middle East in the first decades of the twentieth century, this talk will explore the ways that photographs of archaeology by women such as Gertude Bell shaped the field, but also the way that photographs of women on archaeological projects served to reproduce existing norms. Through photographs from a variety of Middle Eastern archaeological sites including Palmyra and Dura-Europos, Baird asks in what ways photography by women contributed to different visions of archaeology, and what way visions of archaeology held women back.

Sophie Hay 

Underexposed: Tatiana Warscher, the Forgotten Photographer in Pompeii 

Pompeii was captured through the lens from the advent of photography in the mid 19th-century and it was always a man behind the camera: from the romance of Giorgio Sommer’s and Giacomo Brogi’s deserted ruins to the photographs of Vittorio Spinazzola’s excavations taken by his son, Guido. However, in 1923 an unlikely figure arrived in Pompeii who was to change the focus of photography in the ancient site. Tatiana Warscher, a Russian woman who had fled the Revolution in her homeland, came to Pompeii and soon became one of the most revered scholars of the ancient city. Events after her death meant her name fell into obscurity despite her photographic archive remaining an incalculable resource. Hay will discuss Tatiana’s photographs in the context of her work and explore how she helped reframe Pompeian scholarship.

https://aarome.org/it/eventi/jen-baird-sophie-hay-archaeology-photography