Colosseum Pictures (The New Antiquity),

2009

Why make photographs? The puzzle-­picture by Tim Davis proposes a range of answers. Scattered on an Italian city street are twenty-three point-and-shoot cameras, their screens displaying one of the most overexposed of all sightseers’ sights, the Roman Colosseum. Tourists create such snapshots in order to hang on to their escaping holiday or perhaps to put their memories in sync with received knowledge, as if to say: "I saw Rome, and found that it looked just like its pictures." Davis’s own image suggests other motives for using a camera: to juxtapose the enduring and the ephemeral (cobblestones and camera screens; a worn-out archetype and its fresh enactment), and to show that reality and understanding can be, in both senses of the word, funny.