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For the past two months, the Mercati di Traiano - often dubbed Rome's oldest shopping mall - has been hosting a wonderful exhibit called "Gerusalemme Rivelata", or "Jerusalem Rediscovered".
The images are the work of the earliest photographer in Jerusalem, Mendel John Diness, which have been recovered and preserved over the past 15 years by the Archives for Historical Documentation (AHD) based in Brighton, Massachusetts.
Diness captured his historical landscapes between 1854 and 1859 in a project involving Jewish, Christian, and Muslim personalities: the governor Mustapha Surraya Pasha, about to take over the city as Imperial Province in 1854, who engaged the engineer-cartographer Ermete Pierotti to survey the city walls, he, in turn, engaging Diness.
The images were rediscovered almost 150 years after the event - and in extraordinary circumstances. The AHD's President, archaeologist and Catholic priest Dr.Carney Gavin, has been thrilling visitors with the tale he first published in the excellent "Capturing the Holy Land: M.J.Diness and the Beginnings of Photography in Jerusalem" (HUP, 1993).
"In 1989, thousands of miles from Jerusalem, at a garage sale in St.Paul, Minnesota, a photographer named John Barnier came across eight dusty wooden boxes...The boxes contained 134 glass plate negatives, along with eighty silver prints, stereoscopic views, notebooks and other photographic material...".
As Father Gavin relates, it was pure happenstance that the images were saved at all: Barnier found out about the sale by chance, half the plates were about to go to an amateur photographer who wanted to "experiment" with them, and the detective work that followed revealed even more twists of fate. The plates were brought to the garage sale by William Poland, who had found them in his grandmother's attic. And he had only come forward with vital information which linked her with Diness after hearing a National Public Radio broadcast about Barnier's find - as he listened to the radio "while lying on his back and tinkering with a car".
The exhibit employed a range of technologies, from the platinum prints processed by Professor Barnier from glassplate negatives, to the digital scannings carried out by a father and daughter team from Vermont, Paul and Jessica Dunkel, http://www.thearchivalimage.com. They were among a series of specialists who gave lectures on the process of bringing Diness - and other early photographic images and sounds of Jerusalem - into the 21st century.
The images, some reproduced on large banners, looked particularly fine set against the 2000-year-old brickwork of the Mercati di Traiano.
Last night's closing event was another form of international collaboration: a sunset reception in the medieval Loggia dei Cavalieri Rodi - the house of the Knights of Rhodes - which overlooks the Mercati, the Forum, and Mussolini's modern classic, the Vittorio Emanuele Monument. As the light dimmed we heard a trio of voices from Prague performing Bohemian and African songs.
The exhibit, thanks in no small way to its international sponsors, tells a remarkable archaeological tale. It begs an even wider audience.
