Rome Ruins
Rodney Graham Canadian
Not on view
While visiting a friend in Rome in 1977, Graham’s camera was stolen in the Campo de’ Fiori. Without the means to replace it, he constructed his own pinhole camera out of Kodak color film cassettes, matchboxes, tin foil, rubber bands, bottle caps, and other odds and ends. The ephemeral and piecemeal nature of his camera stands in contrast to the subjects to which he turned it: Rome’s enduring monuments. His goal was to make tourist snapshots of Rome that resisted the framing and compositions that have already been replicated in countless prints, paintings, and photographs. Affixing the camera to railings and walls, he created a series of ten guileless views that alter one’s perspective on this known landscape, rendering it by turns fragmentary, evocative, and perplexing.
