Reading and remembering place through digital photography: exploration of an ancient site

This research considers digital photography as an innovative tool that invokes a partnership between scientific (outer) and artistic (inner) modes of enquiry to reveal new ways of reading site, remembering place and interpreting presence. Digital photographic processes are both systematic and fluid, facilitate play, improvisation and new ways of perceiving the world. The work explores the capacity to stitch, layer, blend, variegate, transform and recontextualise photographic images and provides new possibilities for artists to explore imagination and memory, through the merging of art and digital photographic technology. My research focuses on the site of an ancient Greco Roman Theatre, an archaeological excavation at Paphos, Cyprus and asks: how do the processes of digital photography transform artistic practice to represent a contemporary understanding of being-in-place? By examining the digital photographs of key artists, Nancy Burson, Phillip George, Idris Khan, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, I demonstrate the innovative practice of digital photography in crossing discipline boundaries.