Every single issue of Archaeology Odyssey is composed of a thousand decisions. Variety, balance and quality—these are the bywords.
Take the three feature articles in this issue. One emanates from Egypt, another from Jordan, and the third from Cyprus and all over. One is about a person, another about a site, and the third about a product (opium!). One is from the mid-second millennium B.C.; another is from near the turn of the era, 1,300 years later; and the third spans the centuries from the Neolithic period to the Common Era. Each provides background about a civilization but also brings something new and exciting to the subject.
But in one respect two of the stories are similar. The third spreads (a spread consists of two facing pages) of the stories about Egypt’s female pharaoh (Hatshepsut) and about Jordan’s pleasure palace display a site shot covering both pages. This is something we normally would avoid. We prefer design variety. But in this case we had no hesitation in deciding to give these two photographs the prominence they deserve, even though that resulted in a similar design: quality at the expense of variety.
As it happens, the pictures were taken by two of the greatest archaeological photographers in the world—Garo Nalbandian and Erich Lessing. Garo is an Armenian whose family has lived for generations in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Erich is a cosmopolitan Viennese whose photographs were recently exhibited at the Austrian embassy here in Washington. I have known and worked with both men for many years. They are wonderful human beings as well as superb artists. Not quite satisfied with the available pictures of the pleasure palace in Jordan, we sent Garo there to take some new pictures especially for our story. In reviewing his archive, he found that he also had an extraordinary picture of the site that he took before it was reconstructed (see photo of Jordan’s Qasr el-Abd water palace). So we decided to use both—before and after shots, as it were, although the two pictures evoke entirely different feelings.
Erich’s picture of Hatshepsut’s funerary temple didn’t need to be taken specially for this article; fortunately for us, it was in his archive. It was immediately apparent that we could not let this photo lie fallow. The decision to use it on a spread was easy.
One of the pleasures of this job is working with people like Garo and Erich. My admiration is unbounded. They are artists in every sense of the word. But they cannot be as temperamental as other artists. They are bounded—and, in a way, ruled—by elements beyond their control. The subject is there; they cannot change it to their heart’s desire. They can only bring to it the vision of an artist, seeing it with an artist’s eye. To some limited extent, but only to a limited extent, they can control the setting—see what they have done in these two site photographs. They also have only limited control of the lighting—from dawn till dusk, but with all the magical changes coming from the heavens. What lens to use—how wide or narrow—what viewpoint, what angle? They are not their own masters; they must obey the laws of nature. This brings discipline to their art. But the result is an artist’s photo.
Every single issue of Archaeology Odyssey is composed of a thousand decisions. Variety, balance and quality—these are the bywords.
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