Morocco Images III - Volubilis

February 8, 2020
As always, click upon any image to make it BIG!

Between the royal cities of Rabat and Fez there's a spot... A dig into the shadow of the ancient ways beneath Morocco's dirt. They've drilled sort of a manhole... Oops... person hole...  down into the historic foundation of this causeway nation... This bridge which untold millions have crossed between the European and African continents. Okay, historians make the past as unpredictable as the future. It's what they do. Still, here's a spot where Morocco's shoveling into all of our histories.

Our Moroccan Expedition was gamely produced by Gib Armstrong who hauled us both ways
storing us neatly into the buses, planes, and hotels that make touring bearable.
Plate 11

Once upon a time the swath of North Africa framing the Mediterranean Sea was Rome's breadbasket. It was the richest verdant strip of land known to the history of their moment. From the prosperous town of Volubilis in what's now Morocco to the fat and burgeoning Egyptian capitol of Memphis at the mouth of the Nile basin, African farmers fed the vast empire's belly with fruit, olives, wine, meat, and grain in astonishing quantities. They also bred the "wild" animals for Roman colosseums throughout the empire. It was a never-again rivaled regional miracle of cultural, military, political, and agrarian engineering.

Arriving around 45 AD here between the Khoumane river and a shallow verdant slope of Zerhoun mountain, Rome's legions muscled into a sleepy Berber, Mauretanian, Amazigh, and Carthaginian village. They stayed in this place, renamed Volubilis, until either those legions lost their muscle or feisty locals regrew their own in the year 285.

Detail of Volubilis' Trimuphal Arch
Plate 12

Dark ages crushed the town that once housed 20,000 prosperous Romans. They stripped its marble-coated buildings, even crushing the underground piping that carried water to structures, much of it heated to generate radiant warmth beneath floors in cold nights and wintery days. Gone too was the system of sewers that drained the city's refuse. Over the centuries vandals, clerics, and politicians quarried the structures of shiny skins, stones, and bricks to make their own public buildings, mosques and churches, leaving naked bones like that detail above of Volubilis' once grand arch.

Plate 13

But still locals lived in the ancient homes and tread the old village stairs.

Plate 14

For centuries the new Christian religion and later the Muslims worshiped within Roman public buildings they converted into churches then mosques.

Frank & Barbara Pinto pose midst the vast public building
its columns now supporting nests of great white cranes.
Plate 15

Plate 16

The might of Rome still whispers... no shouts is a better word... Yeah, Roman architects and builders routinely created massive works without power tools, elevators, or bulldozer brawn. 

They used a lot of labor, but remember this city had only 20,000 people (including slaves), about the population of  Columbia in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania --  perhaps even fewer . And most of those were there to engage in or support farming. How'd they do that? How did they cloth, feed, house, and support such a large percentage of craftspeople who were not contributing to the productivity which brought wealth from trade to this village?

The mosaic floors of the Volubilis mansions and public buildings showed a rich depth of
highly skilled artisans were available to feed the town's ambitions.
Plate 17

A microcosm of Roman glory, this tiny place off on the western edge of Rome's African empire stood until a massive 1750s Portuguese earthquake some 500 miles to its north jolted everything down. It leveled the last, mostly abandoned, buildings and left it forgotten until the 1920s when French archeologists began its rediscovery. 

Plate 18

The Kingdom of Morocco continues to piece the ancient puzzle-place back together. They're repiling the rocks to remind visitors of ghosts lurking in memory's mists. People who managed to somehow stave off the darkness from 45 till 285AD. Dreamers who reached from this tiny place to the spectacular metropolises of the Nile to create a sparkling necklace of farming wealth that dangled about Rome's southern neck. 

Plate 19

What's left of the children's screams, barking dogs, hard men in sun-bleached tunics? Where's the stench of horse and donkey traffic lugging rackety carts along the arrow-straight Decumanus Maximus the great avenue connecting the city's main gate with and through this once magnificent arch? Squint into the dazzling African sun and that rock pile becomes different... an abstract... a painter's feeling of...

The writer J.P. Hartley said, "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

And there's that person-hole through the arch's center back to where ancients might still do things differently. 

Coming Next: Moroccan Images IV - The mysterious royal city of Fez.

Volubilis Rocks

c. 85AD: Detail of the Volubilis Triumphal Arch

Niche marketing? Hmmmm... Howzabout another title, "Volubilis Is Stoned"? Or was... 

These ruins were originally clad in marble which was later quarried to clad churches, mosques and public buildings by the Berbers, Christians, and Muslim over

succeeding ages.

Oddly this city continued to stand, inhabited, until 1755 when an astounding earthquake some 700 miles to the north in Portugal, buried it. Since the 1912 the French and now UNESCO have slowly uncovered and rehabilitated some of the ancient ruins revealing the great olive-growing wealth of this Western capital of Rome's breadbasket in Northern Africa.  

GEEK STUFF: Hand held Canon 7D MkII, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), ghastly mid-afternoon February lighting under cloudless sky.  Remember, these are the bones of construction once boarded over in marble. The construction/engineering of the city was high by modern standards with extensive underground plumbing, sewage, and radiant heating beneath the homes and streets. For about three centuries none of this infrastructure showed to the city's visitors or residents. It must have dazzled beneath the North African sun.

Rome: An Arch Comment?

Ruins of the Roman Forum from Palantine Hill.

From the Palantine Hill most everyone scopes the ruins of the Roman Forum. The Arch of Septimius Severus (here center right) fascinated me. The thing went up in 203 AD in celebration of Rome's defeat of the Parthians. 

Why my interest? Well the Parthians were essentially the Persians and for some 400 years (247 BC to 224 AD) ruled in most directions from the center of what's now Iran beating up the Romans pretty badly until stopped by Rome's emperor Septimius Severus who pushed them back west of the Persian Gulf - hence the Arch.  

Pendulums swing and now Persian successors in Iran are once again rattling swords toward the West (and vice versa). But, what tickles my imagination is nations' desires to build grand arches. People stand around and photograph London's Wellington Arch, Paris's Triomphe, Germany's Brandenberg, Shimbashi's Victory Arch, St. Petersburg's Victory Arch... on and on.  

 Whyzatt? And why are they all so stereotypical? 

The one up above is far from the world's oldest but after almost two millennia it's a curious model for so many of the rest. It also stands as a reminder of the joint emperors, brothers Caracalla and Geta, who erected the thing and inscribed it with tributes to themselves. After Caracalla got Geta murdered he had ego stuff carved over all references to his brother. So, like most commemorative arches, this one too is all about blood. 

Blood arches are among the things that make me think that: Because you can do something is no reason to do it. Y'know? 
GEEK STUFF: Took this from the place everyone stands on Rome's most famous hill with my Canon 7oD through Old Faithful... my EF-S17-85mm. Pre-processing? Well a multi thousand mile trip plus a hired guide through the ancient city. Post-proccessing? In PSCC 2019 I wiped away the original colors and brushed back my own colored feelings then made a big bunch of trash and debris in the lower left-hand corner go away with artsy negative space.
             :-)

Patagonia 9: Buenos Aires • Vanishing Point

Freudian fun decorates a Recoleta tomb 'erected'
before the psychologist's ideas roiled across the West. 

Thousands wander daily through Recoleta cemetery here in the epicenter of Argentina's brilliant city. They're exploring the excesses of the nation's richest families proclaiming their posterity, or at least trying to grab a piece of immortality for what? Their names?

These are the pyramids of Argentina writ tiny. The metropolis is just north of earthmoving Patagonia where seismic forces are working to crumble South America's lower tip  back into seas. 

So it will take a tad longer in  geological time to crumble all of these little buildings-for-the-dead back into watery dust. 7,000 miles away from Rome yet all built in that ancient city's classic forms - I wonder what will remain of these ruins in a couple of millennia? Judging by the cracks already - you think archaeologists of the fourth millennia will find as much remaining as we do today on the Italian boot?


Here I prefer the word necropolis to cemetery. The olden latonical word has such an ancient sense of what? Dread? Already, well over a century of weight's chipping and cracking at these facades, while hairy grasses are reclaiming the domes - tamping them back into earth. All while gravity and inner moistures are doing what they do to the flesh and bones entombed within these sepulchers of the rotting rich. Brrrrr...

Real estate gone now in Buenos Aires Recoleta cemetery, so the families built upward creating a sort of congested dead lock - dread lock? The hubris of wealth crammed resources into these spots that geological time's crumbling, pounding, and packing back down.

Recoleta Cemetery is not so much a final resting place, but a slow-motion vanishing point.  

*GEEK STUFF:* Captured by my Canon 7D Mk II on February 2, 2019 then processed in PS-CC with a myriad of custom tools and filters. The tombs seemed a clutter of the unfeeling muscles of once-powerful Argentine historical footnotes.

Tough Art!

This sits in Istanbul's Hagia Sophia. Well actually it sits atop a marble jar brought, along with its twin, to Istanbul in the 15th century by Murad III. It probably sat outside for more than half a century before that in the ancient Roman city of Pergamon on the Western tip of Greece.

It's a jaw-dropper... A huge thing, some six or seven feet tall: an urn carved from a solid block of marble that was used in lustration ceremonies.

"Say what?"

Yeah, I had to look that up. Seems they filled these things with oil to create magic circles around infants during naming ceremonies. The belief was that evil was banned from the circle while goodness flowed in. A lot like baptismal ceremonies. You could get a big guy into this thing, with room to move around. Well, not that there was any need to cram a man into it, I'm just saying.

Now it sits in the Hagia Sophia where it's been indoors for another 500 years or so, protected from the weather... First in the Sultan's great mosque, and now that it's been converted into a museum, it's part of the collection of ancient Muslim and early Christian artifacts which the Turkish people maintain for all of us.

Recently Tom Dills asked some questions about the permanency of art, or at least our photographs. He mused about photographer and editor Bruce Jenson's essays on the topic. Bruce has often wondered about the eventual fate of this stuff we do... Well, the stuff that he does and by extension, what we do. Simply put, both Bruce and Tom wonder what happens to the photographs and art we've created when we die.

Which led me to wonder about the Lustration Urns of Pergamon. Did the designers/carvers of these things expect that a millennium or so after they stopped chiseling away stone that people would still wonder at their beauty? Or was the respect their work generated in its spiritual usage sufficient psychic reward. I guess that someone gave them some sort of direct economic payment for their efforts. And I also guess that, like artists always, the sheckles they got felt like too few.

Do you think it's the scale of these urns or their marble, that guaranteed them some sort of lifespan longer than their creator's? If they'd built them out of pixels, I wonder if they'd survive the winds of technology much less fashion, caprice, war, weather, and the tantrums of human taste. Understand, our photographic art is stored in the least permanent form ever imagined. Recently I tossed dozens of 78 RPM classical records of my father's that were created in the 1920s. I have no way of accessing their contents. I'll soon follow them to the trash with dozens of audio recording tapes which need reel-to-reel playback machines. And a lot of Super 8 and VHS family movies will follow them. Do you imagine that your carefully preserved images residing on virtual clouds somewhere will be any more accessible than the stuff you may now have on 8 Trac Tapes, cassettes,or even on CDs and DVDs?

Emily Dickinson had the advantage of "recording" her thoughts on paper, so that they were easily accessed so she could be "discovered" after her death. Imagine if she'd dropped them onto floppy discs?

Forget the "quality" of the work, what's "permanent" art demand? Not merely high levels of imagination and creativity, but some impermeable strata that can withstand time's vandals. Oh, and it probably should be big... like this lustration urn... Huge enough... to get noticed, right?

Roman Time

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Time exists so that
Everything doesn't
Seem to happen at
Once.

In Rome I noticed that different things seem to change by different clocks. Change needs time, but time is an oddly capricious engine. I wonder though if that big... big... window, unlike the nail-chewing lad, has figured out how to waste its time? Hmmm.... maybe that's what makes us different from everything else that exists?

••••

Took this in Rome with my Canon 20 at about 20mm and processed it with PS4, Topaz, Alien Skin's SnapArt: oil paint. The brushes and texture screens are customized for this image.

Farmacia - Rome

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I was walking one night through Rome just as a storm rolled past. Only a half block away the traffic wizzed and honked. Unlike New York, nearby to high intensity Roman streets nestle eddies of peace. It's as if the city closes up in spots yet continues to thrum only meters away.

What's up with that, huh?

Geek Stuff

Took this with my 20D. Processed it first in PS/CS4 where I cropped it, reset the dynamic range and applied parts of several different Topaz filters to restructure the texture. I also re-crafted the palette. Then after sharpening the picture I applied a Snap3 filter (oil). Then once again I applied a series of curve layers and masked in the new ranges to again redefine the dynamics and I used a series of PS brushes to mask in the various curve layers and to create new brush strokes.

Oh yeah... sorry... I also used the PS perspective tool early on to rearrange some of the vertical and horizontal angles to create a structural flow to direct everything toward the cross. Um, maybe some small additional iterations. Okay... okay... here's the original - see if you can spot them.


This is all about atmosphere and mood. I see it framed large on the wall of an elegant room to compliment an expensive modern European mood.

Frank Byrne

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Frank Byrne's my neighbor. Frank and his wife travel the world.

See Frank travel?

Are we related? Hmmmm.... probably.

Technical stuff? Well I took Frank's picture with my G10 in Musser Park last week. Took the image of St. Peter's at the Vatican last time I was in Italy (love writing that). I used my old Canon D20 with the Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6). And I abstracted all of those feelings using Bokeh and Snap Art. You know this'd probably be stunning blown up large over a fireplace inside of one of those great gilded and filagreed frames, huh?

Texture Addiction

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The texture rage is cresting. Im not sure why textures seem to add additional dimensions to otherwise ordinary snapshots. Any thought?

Time

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Legions shook mighty fists
While priests and druids
Hurled fearsome oaths.

In the end, time
Stormed against them.
To blunt their edge,
Their youth,
Their glimmering muscle.

Time is the gap between

Reign and rain.




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Here's the virgin image from my Flash Card.

Threesome

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Shot on the Roman streets where, after all, antiquity is little more than a set for The Play. Girl meets, gets, loses, and maybe gets boy again? Here's where the, um, rubber meets the road?

Okay, the movie camera's running... go ahead - set the scene, explain the details, write the dialogue.

Whew... after yesterday's rant - it's good to be back in the theater where life isn't so much about details as it is filled with them.

Fabulous Fotos - NOT!

To Everyone Whose Sites I Normally Visit: My MacBook Pro has crashed and will be gone for a week to the Macintosh repair shop. I do my site visits on that machine while I am near to wife/friends/people. I do my images up here alone on my "good" machine. So.. I hope until the laptop returns, you will forgive my absence from popping around?

And now for the rant-of-the-day...

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HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! - when I do this. See this perfectly exposed night time shot? See that it's perfectly framed? Perfectly colored? See the perfect reflection shimmering across the Tiber in down-town Rome? See how the composition is a textbook square? With textbook inner framing of the leaves? See how the mass of the boat in the lower left just balances what I think is Hadrian's tomb lit against the night-time sky? See how controlled, how .... how... perfect, perfect, perfect every little detail, including the color palette is?

And now see that it adds absolutely nothing to our package of ideas? The feeling's been captured a zillion times by anyone passing this point with an Instimatic. GRUMBLE!!!!

So why the hell did I waste my time taking this thing? And I've got dozens and dozens of images like this on my Italian discs. Why do we feel a compulsion to repeat what others have done at least as well? I could have walked forty feet to a tourist store and bought dozens of postcards with this view. Why is it that our own imagination becomes stunted at moments like this? All that I saw was what others saw more times than your Hollywood star goes to rehab.

I'll tell you why... Because our imagination leaves us at these moments. It's as if a mass of photographic ghosts suddenly SCREEEECH all together with such din that they overwhelm our own ideas and feelings. It makes me want to cover my ears and scream...

Instead... I take their picture rather than my own, and come home and grumble.....

The moral: When it isn't your idea in the viewfinder - Don't trigger the shutter.

What's Left

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I wrote about Jeff Curto's teachings yesterday. It's worth a trip to iTunes to download his free course on the history of photography. I've listened to it once through. Now I've discovered that I can pick lectures randomly and listen to them as I work on my own images. The repetition helps the ideas sink in.

It was one of those ideas that fathered this image. I seem to recall him saying that painters start with nothing and have to edit everything onto an empty canvas. But a photographer starts out with everything and then edits reality away. We start through framing, then use whatever craft we can master to identify the singular idea and feeling which we want to communicate.

That was precisely my challenge as I looked at these Roman windows. By the way, they don't seem to have flies in Rome or Florence. I never once saw a screen on a window. And I guess that's why they use their windows a lot more than we do. People seem routinely to lean out and peer at everything. Here in Lancaster City, it's rare to see folks hanging out and watching or carrying on conversations with passers-by. And look at how those windows were cut into that wall. They are poked everywhere.

The idea which I've left then? A lot more than light passes through a Roman's window.

Veiled

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Professor Jeff Curto in his on-line podcast of a course on Photographic History wondered when a photograph is made. Is it, he mused, when the shutter is tripped? Or is it when the artist says it is made?

Look here at this woman I found on the street not far from Rome's Trevi Fountain. I took one exposure through gaps between the heads of maybe ten or fourteen people. She was part of the street theater which surrounds many of the city's most popular sites. The day was warm, her costume hot and perhaps an authentic reproduction of 17th or 18th century pomp. In a lot of ways she was a mannequin. Oddly there seemed something poignant about the way she made her living standing there in the fading sun of a late fall afternoon.

I knew that I felt something as I looked at the mysterious veiled woman. And I wanted to tell that feeling to you in this image.

Which makes me wonder something farther about Jeff's question. I wonder if the photograph is made when it communicates? If that's the case, then it's not me who finally decides it's finished but... you.

Curious.

Thoughts?

See That Stop Sign? Huh? Huh?

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Agfachrome was my favorite slide film. I liked the drama of its reds and the way it cranked up the intensity of its palette. There seemed to be the subtlest kiss of gold in the whites and it always processed about a quarter stop under, giving it overtones of shadowy romantic mystery.

Is it still available? Doesn't matter to me now, I'll never return to film. But just as memories of early rock will influence the way I hear music to always, say, set me hunting for the interplay of the bass drum and the electric bass. So will the memory of what Agfachrome could capture set me searching to capture its memories and feelings in my current photography.

So here I've lathered that Agfa nostalgia atop of one of photography's debates. When we make our images, do we express reality or distort it? Attack it? One thing's clear though - we certainly diddle with reality when we filter it through our imagination. I guess that's why Ansel Adams always insisted that we don't take photographs... we make them.

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My object here: When I saw this barber on a break in his doorway, I imagined him on the set of an Italian opera. I'm told many were set on these streets of Rome, so it seemed as if stage lighting should spot the barber and enough of his surroundings to clearly place him in an ancient, yet modern place. And it was this theatrical sense of place which I wanted to present to you. So? How my doing?

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WHAT'S ODD ABOUT THE ROMAN STOP SIGNS? Look at it carefully. Now it's an Italian sign so... Why the heck is it in English? They all are! Both in shape,color, and words - they are identical to American signs. Know why? Lemme know.

Passionata-Lingerie

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"So?" her friend wonders.
"Hmmm,: she murmurs. "Hmmmm..."

Buying software is difficult. You've got to match the tool to the job. And of course everyone's hunting for the killer application. Most importantly it's got to be powerful, easy to get into and manipulate. Flexibility's crucial... but overall you want it to be user friendly and totally interactive. I wonder, are boys still more into software than girls? Well, perhaps in this case "into" is the wrong word? Maybe boys still like to play with software more than girls. You know how they like games.

The thing is that the fastest software still has the least code. It's efficiency seems to erupt from its simplicity and ease of access. I wonder just what job these two have in mind? is this application fast enough for these Roman chicks window shopping at the train station shop? And will it cover their essential... um... needs?

Men frequently miss the point that Passionata Lingerie is a tool store. Right?

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Now for a rant... Imagine if those two up there in that image were men! Yeah, two guys standing in exactly the same positions, trading studious comments, as they studied that poster. If they were guys, women would have a name for them, right? It'd be, "PERVERTS!"

Hmmmm... is that fair? Just? Heh - heh - heh..... In fact as I watched this scene the guys looked at the window but with sly sideward glances, while the gals were totally involved. But.. but... isn't the entire object of this particular piece of, um, software supposed to be focused like a rifle shot at men? Yet if we look... I mean really LOOK! ... LOOKOUT, Buster... You... You... PERVERT!

Life's a puzzlement, eh?

Parked

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I wonder. When the Smart Cars arrive in the U.S., will the parkers get away with this? Thoughts?

Reasons

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Some say that everything comes from everything else. Which, they say, means that everything has a reason. Which leads me to conclude that while everything might have a reason, not everything is a reason.

Okay, let me unsnarl all of that with an example. These images come from The Roman Coliseum. The thing’s a weighty devil. Look at its intricacy. Over two thousand years ago this complex thing was erected with such precision that what you see here still stands as firm as a mountain. Heavy construction like this is common now. We see similar ruins of buildings all around that were built in the last couple of hundred years.

Those seem to come from ideas you can see up there in those images. The reason that we can build what we’ve got are the child of that Coliseum, right? Um, not so fast. We’re left with a couple of questions before we can make that leap.

First, where’s the proof that the information about construction and design was passed along over those thousands of years. Did our contractors look at the Coliseum and magically understand how to replicate something that massive, that complicated and huge? Which makes you wonder if the Coliseum’s creators somehow created our modern buildings or whether something else happened?

My second wonder’s not about the reason for our own buildings but the reason for the Coliseum in the first place? At least our designers were able to look at the ruins in my images. But what did the Coliseum’s contractors look at?

See, I agree that our modern buildings have a reason, and that the Coliseum has a reason. But did the things that caused the Coliseum cause what we build? Or was the line of communication savagely and irredeemably disrupted by the Dark Ages?

And what the heck caused people to build the Coliseum without ever seeing anything like it? While it’s easy to conclude that the reason we have our modern Coliseums was that big pile of attractive rubble in my pictures. After all they sure look similar, huh?

But… but… but… Did we have to relearn everything needed to do it? Where’s that learning come from? Where’d it come from originally?

Hmmmm… it seems to me that this Coliseum and ours might have a reason. And it might be the same one. But it’s not clear that Roman building was the reason for ours.

Is it?

Um, Unusual

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This actually looks intriguing printed 19" long. It's rich in subtle details, texture, and wispy color. I think I have found a limitation to the internet, eh? Darn.

Hope

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You’ve seen this Piazza Della Retunda before here last November 19th.
There’s a reason I aimed high for this image, which was the same reason I aimed low back then. Last time I wanted to capture the people who crammed the square around me as this sun set. This time it was the Pantheon which somehow spoke of its two millennia of almost continuous use.

Optimistic solidity… That’s what I felt from the ancient temple. Look at that architectural bridge. This design has one leg here among the classical buildings going up in every important world city… and the other among the Caesars. Even the type font along the arch seems formally and elegantly modern.

I wanted to get all of that into this moment between a Roman day and night – a moment which the Pantheon has shared about 730,000 times!

Put that into perspective: the average business computer lives about 1,100 days while each of us get about 27,000 sunsets. After seven hundred and thirty thousand sunsets, what’s astonishing isn’t that this place is so old, but that it still feels so hopeful.