E-raamat: Archaeology of Architecture: Photowriting the Built Environment

"This work combines photography of both commercial and vernacular architecture around the world in a series of short essays examining what structures can reveal about their pasts and the present. The author's contribution as photographer/ethnographer provides a unique anthropological perspective to the observation that all buildings reflect a story that leads from construction through occupation to abandonment"--

In a landscape format (10.25x8.25"), this book contains two-page spreads with a color photo on one page and text on the other--displaying what the author terms photowriting in which the image tells a story, and the words paint a picture. The photos are of buildings, walls, storefronts, gates, and doors--elements of architecture observed and captured during travels in the US and elsewhere. Tedlock is a professor of English and of anthropology at the State U. of New York at Buffalo. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Page by page, this book takes us on a journey through the built world that ranges from Greece to Guatemala and from New York to San Francisco. Tedlock practices what he calls photowriting, a creative process that brings photographer and writer together in the same person. It may be true enough that a photograph can show more than words can say, but it is equally true that words can say more than a photograph can show. A third space opens up in the middle, where the viewer-reader can look back and forth between image and text at will.

Tedlock looks at the built world with the eye of an archaeologist and ethnographer. His long experience as a fieldworker has made him acutely aware of the ways in which buildings are continuously altered by human actions and natural forces. Anthropology assigns ruins to archaeology and structures currently in use to ethnology, but Tedlock reminds the viewer that an occupied building bears marks of the same processes that produce archaeological remains. As he puts it, "Whenever I look around at the worlds humans build for themselves, I see archaeology in the making."