Fixing the Acropolis: William J. Stillman and the Restoration of Athenian Antiquity

Abstract

William J. Stillman’s 1870 photographic album The Acropolis of Athens details, with extraordinary sensitivity, the classical monuments of the Athenian Acropolis. But the album itself is part of a larger transnational history of the production, representation, and circulation of Greek antiquity. It is also a central artefact of Stillman’s own life and affiliations. Tracing these two interlocking histories is to place the album’s imagery, narrative, and informational material within the larger ambit of individual, national, and Euro-American politics, historical ideology and aesthetics. Stillman’s album is centrally influenced by the German-led archaeological activity on the Acropolis, reflecting both its widely-held assumptions on the worth of Greek antiquities and the proper way to view them, as well as an ambivalence verging on antipathy toward indigenous Greek archaeological (and photographic) activity. This tendency complicates (but does not completely erase) Stillman’s powerful sympathy and outspoken activities on behalf of Greek and Cretan independence and self-determination. The moment that produced Stillman’s album is not the only one in which he photographed the Athenian Acropolis. Comparing his photography of 1870 with his 1882 rephotography of the site is to find changes and slippages that highlight the vicissitudes of Stillman’s own complex history. It also has significant implications for the imagery he produced earlier, connecting Stillman’s work to the larger constellation of nineteenth-century imagery of the Athenian Acropolis.