Trainscape: Philadelphia-Lancaster

My daily commute (Philadelphia-Lancaster) involves one of America's most historic train routes, the Main Line built by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company around 1850. See 1855 map of the the railway below from about the time that painter Mary Cassatt's family moved from Pittsburgh to Lancaster and then to Philadelphia. Her brother Alexander became the Pennsylvania Railroad's president.
The Main Line gave its name to Philadelphia's elite suburbs but its primary objective was to link Philadelphia to Pittsburgh via Harrisburg. My commute lasts a little over one hour and covers about 68 miles of linear miles. Recently, I have started to pay close attention to the human geographies my path crosses that can be divided into nine zones: 1. booming corporate cityscape of downtown Philadelphia, 2. glorious residential neighborhoods of the late 19th/early 20th c. now depressed ghetto, 3. the prosperous early suburbs of "the Main Line," 4. a corporate park islands where the peripheral highways intersect, 5. sprawling ex-burbs of subdivisions, 6. forest, 7. small industrial towns, 8. pristine Amish and Mennonite farmland, 9. urban Lancaster. From Pennsylvania Station in Philadelphia (now Amtrak 30th Street Station) to Pennsylvania Station in Lancaster, I observe from my train window a cross-section of American history and urban politics.
As an archaeologist, I ponder ways to document this passage. On March 10, I started simply by writing down facts and thoughts in a stream of consciousness kind of way. Inspired by Bill Caraher's "Walking Home and the Phenomenology of Landscape" (Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, Mach 8, 2010), I post my first notebook entries.

What makes my commute an incredible experience is its visual primacy. The number of buildings, urban installations, signs, objects, people, and landscapes that I cross are powerfully iconic and simply beautiful. So I set myself a drawing exercise, a kind of quick-sketching as the train rushed through the landscape. On March 24, 2010, when I first tried this method, I produced the following visual notes between Lancaster and the beginning of Philadelphia's suburbs.
The next day, March 25, I've decided to regulate my process typologically. Since I am teaching a seminar on religious architecture, I decided to make note of every religious building that I could decipher from my train window. Looking only southward, I noted almost 50 churches and synagogues. One of my new tasks is to find a system to actually document the visual evidence of those buildings that are intentionally visible from the rail line (most buildings built after 1850). A continuous elevation drawing is one of the exercises I have in mind, although it would take years and years to complete. For the time being, I have decided to simply build up the database and identify all the buildings visible from my window. Using Google Maps and Google Earth, I hope to identify the actual location of those visible monuments and inspect them one by one. Sixteen of the churches that one sees immediately out of Philadelphia are actually in my neighborhood, moving into the depths of depressed West Philadelphia. The weather is getting nice and it's time to oil the chain of my bicycle.

If churches is one obvious typology, thanks to the visible steeples and towers, what would be the other interesting category to document? Here is a list of typologies that would yield a fascinating picture and that I would enjoy mapping and thinking about:

1. Churches
2. Ruins
3. Modernist masterpieces
4. Postmodernist anti-masterpieces
5. Signs and texts
6. Factories and warehouses
7. Railroad stations
8. Objects (like visible trash, garden fixtures, etc.)

Main Line

Pictorial notes -- looking out of the window -- Main Line train ride from Amtrak 30th Street Station (top left) to Overbrook (bottom right)

Prospecting Coatesville

The drawing on the left is just a quick look at the exterior of Lancaster's Pennsylvania Station showing two courses of marble revetment, the limestone base molding and the system of brickwork. The Pennsylvania Main Line to Lancaster stops at one of PA's most important steel-mill towns, Coatesville. The steel beams of the World Trade Center, for instance, were manufactured here. The quick sketch on the right tries to map the dynamic microcosm of Coatesville that developed at the intersection of the Brandywine River and the Main Line railroad. There is Lukens Steel, the 19th-c grid town with its cottage row houses, and a conspicuous suburbia that developed around Rt. 30. Coatesville contains one of Modern Architecture's forgotten landmarks, Carver Court, a housing project designed by Louis Kahn, Oscar Storonov and George Howe in 1940. The complex seems to be still standing, but I haven't explored it yet. It would be interesting to compare Carver Court with the "Pennsylvania House" that Howe designed with Wharton Esherick the same year for 1939 World's Fair in New York.

Main Line

Quick drawing, view from train, rolling out of 30th Street Station on Main Line. Drawing on arbitrary homework assignment in hand

Louis Kahn's African-American Vernacular

Also posted on Society of Architectural Historians blog, March 26, 2014

When the telephone rang in my office at Franklin & Marshall College, I was surprised to learn that the caller on the other line was a resident of a Louis Kahn house and, most strikingly, a Louis Kahn house that has been largely forgotten. In 1942, Kahn, Oscar Storonov, and George Howe reconfigured the traditional row house to serve a community of African-American steel workers returning from World War II. Known to just a handful of architectural historians, Carver Court in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, had receded from public attention. And for that very reason, the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia had placed it on its 2012 Endangered Properties List. Thanks to the stewardship of Ben Leech and the research of Allee Berger, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission determined Carver Court eligible for listing in the National Register of HIstoric Places in March 2013.

As the local architectural historian, I was invited to meet with civic and community leaders of Caln Township to brainstorm on the future of this housing complex and to strategize on celebrating its unique role in the history of African-American labor. Although I am not a Kahn expert, I had worked in Louis Kahn's archives as a student, and wanted to seize the moment that William Whitaker and Ben Marcus have set into motion with their spectacular new book, The Houses of Louis Kahn, and accompanying exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives.

Carver Court is no ordinary house by virtue of its users, some of which are the original African-American steelworkers. Most of the better-known Kahn houses were commissioned by Philadelphia’s professional class and are located in the suburbs, while Carver Court engages Kahn’s early commitment to social and economic justice. If it were up to Kahn, Carver Court would not have been segregated. Race politics at this Pennsylvania mill town necessitated the residential division between black and white workers, even though both groups worked for the same Lukens Steel factory. The lynching of Zachariah Walker in 1911 underscored such ethnic tensions. Caln Township was initially settled by William Penn in 1714. Ironically, the white and black housing projects were separated by the Gardner-Beale farm, which had strong Quaker roots and served in the Underground Railroad. A farmhouse from 1811 survives and is now surrounded by Coatesville High School completed in 1968.

Louis Kahn was a housing activist as early as 1931, when he founded the Architecture Research Group. His partner, Oscar Storonov (and Alfred Kastner), had designed the first Modernist housing project in America, the Carl Mackley Houses for the hosiery workers union (1932). Kahn’s activism helped fight Philadelphia’s resistance to public housing and led into the foundation of the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Carver Court is the greatest physical manifestation of Kahn’s labor union vernacular.

Coatesville is located half way between Philadelphia and Lancaster at the intersection of the Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line and the Brandywine River. Coatesville’s steel mills, that produced the beams for the World Trade Center, are of great historical significance and, like Kahn’s housing, continue to operate (under new global management). Carver Court’s remoteness from Philadelphia and the general economic decline of manufacturing have contributed in a slow forgetting of both Pennsylvania’s labor movement and Philadelphia’s architectural engagement. Six decades after its original completion, Carver Court asks some important questions. It is only one of five housing projects designed by Kahn, Storonov, and Howe, and it the single specimen of their African-American architecture. Carver Court has slipped the radar of preservationists and historians because it looks nondescript and lacks the telltale signs of high modernist distinction. Its ordinariness, however, is what makes it exemplary. Taking cues from Le Corbusier’s elevated piloti, Kahn invented a scheme of adoptive design that reinterpreted the traditional row house. His “ground-freed” housing form elevated living quarters to the second floor and left the first floor open to the owner’s specific interpretation. Rather than limiting what the owners did with their allotted housing unit, Kahn wanted the occupants to exercise some freedom in how to use the first floor. It could function as a garage, a workshop, or added living space. The architect’s agency could be supplemented by the occupant’s agency, giving the community a sense of ownership and design engagement. Thus, the very indeterminacy of Carver Court that makes it a specimen of democratic design has also caused its progressive neglect by scholarship.

The phone call from Carver Court and the meeting with Caln Township precipitated a series of questions on both the original significance of the monument as well as the pedagogical opportunities in its rediscovery. A call from a grassroots community generates a research opportunity beyond the obvious scholarly needs. Involving undergraduate students in the documentation of Carver Court’s story seems one of those rare opportunities to engage students with artifacts. First, it is astounding how much work remains to be done even on America’s most important modernist architect. Understanding the afterlife of Carver Court is one immediate challenge, but one of great potential in teaching what Delores Hayden called “the power of place.”

Ann Arbor's First Greek Garage Church: Holy and Unholy Spirits

Greek immigrants of the early-20th century held religious services in a diversity of spaces including stores, houses and garages. Last week, I had a chance to explore one such space, a garage in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Greeks held their first church services in 1927. The garage was also busted for illegal alcohol in 1930, and its owner (the priest's son) was arrested. The congruence of holy and unholy spirits makes this otherwise ordinary building a special specimen of diaspora architecture. Amazingly, the structure still survives and is owned by a lovely family who has taken excellent care of the property.

On March 21, 2019, I was honored to give the 17th Annual Dimitri and Imgard Pallas Lecture in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Michigan. My talk was called "Excavating Home: Archaeologies of the Greek American Experience," so I couldn't have left Ann Arbor before some exploration. The day after my talk and a few hours before my departing flight, I took a walk down S. Main Street in search of the legendary moonshine church garage.

Ann Arbor is the home of an important Greek immigrant community. Along with Italians, Russians and Poles, Greeks made up 13% of the population in the 1920s. The city commemorates its Greek architectural heritage with plaques that on early Greek restaurants around Court House Square. A plaque at 126 S Main (left), for example, celebrates the Sugar Bowl confectionary and restaurant that survives only in photographs. The first Greeks of Ann Arbor were served by clergy traveling from Detroit until 1927, when a priest arrived from the old country. Father Nicholas Agathangelos was a 1922 Asia Minor refugee from the village of Adaval (now Aktas). After a short stay in Greece, where he received some ecclesiastical education, he joined his sons in Ann Arbor. In 1927, the first Orthodox mass was celebrated in a garage owned by his son. By 1935, the Greeks of Ann Arbor had raised enough funs to build the church of Saint Nicholas at 414 N Main Street. In 1998, the church moved to 3109 Scio Church Road and the old Saint Nicholas was torn down (illustrated below from 1945 church bulletin). The new Saint Nicholas continues to function today as the epicenter of the Greek community (see history here). 

The details of the 1927 garage church seem to have disappeared until Will Stroebel made a passing reference in his essay "The Hyphenated Hyphen: Turkish-in-the-Greek-Script American Literature," Ergon: Greek American Arts and Letters (Dec. 18, 2018). Will is a star of Greek American Studies. He received his PhD from Michigan in Comparative Literature in 2017. His thesis, "Fluid Books, Fluid Borders: Modern Greek and Turkish Book Networks in a Shifting Sea," has won two awards, the 2019 best dissertation prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and the 2019 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. Will's work is about the transnational and linguistic complexities between Greece and Turkey. In the Ergon essay, Stroebel explores Agathangelos's story as a Turkish-speaking Greek serving the religious needs of a diaspora population whose language he did not speak. In addition to being Ann Arbor's first clergyman, Agathangelos left behind an amazing corpus of literary and artistic works that Will has brought to light.

Will (happened to have lived in that neighborhood in his early grad school years) gave me the precise address of Ann Arbor's garage church and some encouragement to poke around. He also sent me the reference to the police report on the garage's alcohol violation by Agathangelos's son, Constantine Pappas (short for Papadopoulos):

"Arrests on liquor and traffic charges continued to be reported at police headquarters during Sunday and Monday following the unusual number of such cases on the county court docket Friday and Saturday. Dave Ragen, 221 West Washington street, and Constantine Pappas, 312 Pauline Boulevard, are being held on charges of violation of the prohibition laws. Police raided Pappas' home and discovered two bottles of liquor, they reported. A subsequent raid on his store at 119 East Ann street resulted in the confiscation of several gallons of liquor, 50 gallons of mash, and a still, police said. Ragen had, a pint of liquor on his person at the time of his arrest, according to the officers." The Michigan Daily 41:26 (Oct. 28, 1930), p. 3.

With the details of the report, I was able to locate the site. The garage measures about 15 x 20 ft. It sits in the back of a shotgun house constructed in 1895. Both house and garage have gone through renovations, but the bones of both buildings remain intact. The current owners were incredibly hospitable in giving me a tour of the house and garage (which currently serves as home for their nice cat). The original house (ca. 18 x 40 ft) was a two story home with two adjacent rooms per floor. Access to the second floor would have been from a staircase in the back, which was removed in the 1940s when a new kitchen was added. We can date the kitchen from the intact cabinetry manufactured by the Modern Steel Equipment Co. in Geneva, Ill. (see 1938 catalog here). The house was enlarged in 1990s, but retained the original rooms, including the beautiful molding and hardware. 

The garage is made out of wood on a concrete foundation with all its wooden structure intact. The siding is contemporary and matches the house renovation, but the interior space is exactly as would have been experienced by Agathangelos and his congregation in 1927. In many ways, the Ann Arbor church garage is comparable to a rural Greek chapel. It is basilical in plan and the small window in the middle of its north facade (above) would have framed the moveable altar. With so much of the interior spaces intact, I hope to draw an interior reconstruction at a future post.

We can gather from the The Michigan Daily crime report that Constantine Pappas distilled the alcohol in his store at 119 E Ann Street (where a still was found). The store was part of the Hoban Block built in 1871 and survives today and houses a furniture store. 

This little exploration of the architectural realities of early 

Greek Ann Arbor provide important clues on the early phases of immigration before the establishment of permanent social centers. The double arrest between the downtown shop and the extra-urban garage show the urban dynamics of the early American city. Walking south on Main Street to the Pappas garage, one feels the industrial heritage of Ann Arbor. After the vibrant commercial downtown, one passes the perennial warehouse-condominiums of the 2010s, factories converted into the Yard luxury student apartments or the 618 S Main.

This south end of town still retains the evidence of thriving mill industry that made Ann Arbor thrive in the early 20th century. The surrounding housing, worker cottages, would have served the mill industry. An old rail line cuts S Main St diagonally and gives clues of the city's connectivity to Detroit and Toledo. Unfortunately, the 1924 Sanborn Fire Insurance map does not cover the block under consideration (below). If it did, we would have had an almost contemporary plan of our garage-church. 

How a Quaker Metropolis Became an Orthodox Village

I was invited to give a paper at a conference at Yale this October, which will be the first in a series of papers from the fieldwork that I did with my students in Philadelphia's Greek town. The conference is about liturgical arts and material culture. I will be talking about the 18th/early-19th-century houses, churches, and public spaces left behind by white flight (to West of Broad Street, the Main Line, etc.) and occupied by Greeks, African Americans (to the south), and Russian Jews (to the east). The photo above is from the Greek American Heritage Society of Philadelphia archives. It is the annual Easter festival hosted by the Stephano Brothers at their house in Elkins Park. Here is my abstract

How a Quaker Metropolis Became an Orthodox Village
Material Christianity in Philadelphia’s Greektown, 1900-1930

The modern American city witnessed a great influx of immigrants whose religious traditions differed greatly from the Protestant or Irish Catholic mainstream. Fleeing economic or political hardship, the ethnic migrants did not bring to the U.S. the artistic materiel of their ancient liturgical traditions, but sustained the ecclesiastical needs of their homes by sending remittances to their impoverished villages. How did art and architecture materialize liturgical experiences in the melting pot of the American city? The archaeology of Philadelphia’s Greektown offers insights on how a historically Quaker city became materially Orthodox by a migrant minority. As Philadelphians abandoned their colonial city for the affluent suburbs, the new Greeks shared spatial and artistic experiences with two equally marginal newcomers, Russian Jews and African Americans (studied in great detail by W. E. B. Du Bois). On the opposite side of the transnational story, the archaeology of Greek villages reveals material transformations of Orthodox Christianity back home.

Overbrook Station

After open house at the International French School, I found myself at Overbrook Station, along the Pennsylvania Main Line. I usually see the station at 40 miles per hours, zipping along my train to Lancaster. With 15 mins of waiting, I had the treat to look closely at the beautiful carpentry of its shed. Constructed around 1860 it contains the hallmarks of its period, turning, tapering, picturesque compositions.

All Over Coffee

It's nice to start 2011 with new heroes. Wandering through a Main Line Border's on New Year's Day, running after Kalliope's toddler meanderings, we passed the Graphic Novel section. Usually inundated with teenage boys (DC Comics) or teenage girls (Manga), Graphic Novels was pretty tame on New Year's Day. Someone had left unshelved a little graphic work that caught my short attention. Its author is my first discovery of 2011, an artist by the name of Paul Madonna. Starting in February 2004, the San Francisco Gate began publishing a weekly feature called "All Over Coffee." Paul Madonna drew architectural scenes from San Francisco's urban landscape and coupled them with texts inspired by conversations he overheard in the city's cafes. The drawings in pen and ink-wash are fabulously precise. They immediately reminded me of a similar drawing project by another graphic hero, Ben Leech, and his documentation of Lancaster. SF Gate continues to print the All Coffee Series. Today's installation for instance, is the following (click here for proper citation)

Madonna, "All Over Coffee" series was published in a book form in 2006 by City Lights, and it was this version that leaped into my attention on a lazy New Year's afternoon. Madonna's juxtapositions of personal narrative and architectural setting are provocative and have been praised by masters of narration like Dave Eggars. You can read more about Madonna and his projects in his official website here.

The fans of archaeology, urban geography and graffiti, will also appreciate Madonna's illustrations in a collaboration with Delfin Vigil, Nikko Concrete Commando. It's a true story of Vigil's search for the San Francisco tagger Nikko. The blur reads, "Sometime in the 1960s, a San Francisco kid began etching his name, NIKKO, in the sidewalks of his North Beach neighborhood. NIKKO went on to leave his mark nearly 1,000 times in the sidewalks of San Francisco. This is the true story of how, 40 years later, another San Francisco kid tracked NIKKO down by using the clues that are still in the ground today." Check it out.

Morea Project Revisited

It's very disheartening that the Morea Project data exists on-line but it is practically un-Googleable. As a result, nobody ever looks at it, uses it in scholarship, or ever comments on it. Thus, I feel compelled to advertise it. Everyone, please click here. Archaeological Sites of Eleia, the latest iteration of the website, contains all the digitized data from the Morea Project, including scans of our B/W negatives. The photos themselves have become archival since most of the houses were documented 15-some years ago. Moreover, the region suffered devastating fires in 2007 that destroyed many of our villages. Our photographs are, sadly, the last testament before the destruction.

The Morea Project recorded thousands of specimen of medieval and early modern houses between 1991 and 2001. The project was published in Houses of the Morea: Vernacular Architecture of the Northwest Peloponnesos (1205-1955) (Athens, 2002). My dissertation, "Landmarks of Rural Archaeology: Medieval Settlements in the Northwestern Peloponnese" (2003) provided a denser publication of the medieval settlements.

A Morea Project exhibition with original drawings, photos and models took place at the Gennadeios Library in Athens, May 21-August 15, 2002 and then traveled to Eleia. While the Greek archaeological service was preparing the spectacular Chlemoutsi Museum, the Morea Project was on display in the castle for almost three continuous years, August 17, 2004-July 17, 2007.

In the meantime, the digital genius Todd Brenningmeyer produced an on-line catalog under the MARWP website. In 2007, the Greek Ministry of Culture asked us to make available the Morea Project data in the new Pyrgos Archaeological Museum. The museum is housed in the old neoclassical market of Ernst Ziller. Although the building itself has been beautifully restored, the exhibits have not been installed and the museum has not yet openned. The opportunity to repackage the data for the Pyrgos Museum lead Todd Brenningmeyer to improve his on-line catalog and create a brand new website that you clicked on earlier.

This last June, Todd and I started a new collaboration, re-photographing some of the Morea Project sites in Eleia. This work was done under the auspices of the Pyrgos Museum and the Greek Archaeological Service. We brought students from our respective schools (University of Maryville, Franklin & Marshall) and experimented with new aerial photogrammetric tools. Todd had received a grant from Hewlett Packard with which he bought all the advanced technology (GPS's, cameras, GIS and photogrammetric software, kites, ballon etc.), and we pooled together our academic resources. The collaboration was terrific and we are tempted in turning it into an annual field school.

For instance, we revisited Taxiarches, the first village that the Morea Project completed almost 20 years ago, and rephotographed all the houses. This means that we now have a record of what happened in Taxiarches between 1991 and 2010. The village continues to be semi-abandoned. The greatest shock to me was to see an African immigrants herding the village's sheep. The streets are being repaved by Albanian workmen. Emigrants are returning for the summer, including Greek-Americans who worked in the World Trade Center (and were lucky enough not to go to work on 9/11). Like many "traditional" villages in Greece, the processes of globalization are evident.

The photo above shows Taxiarches' main spring house dating to 1832.

Walking to Lancaster

Ben Leech has a habit of putting wild ideas in my head. Most recently, he suggested walking from Lancaster to Philadelphia. The distance of about 60 miles travels along one of the oldest roads in North America, the King's Highway. The year 2014 seems like a good year to walk the walk.

On the left you see my little study of King's Highway (in black) along the Pennsylvania Main Railroad line (in red) as mapped in 1855. I commute from Philadelphia to Lancaster, while Ben commutes from Lancaster to Philadelphia, sharing a common view along the red line. I have blogged before about this amazing Trainscape, that presents the most succinct navigation of America's social history in one hour. In a British context, Patrick Keiller entitled his collection of essays, The View from the Train: Cities and other Landscapes (2013), which gets to the heart of this vantage point.

Is a walking journey realistic? In my estimation, it would take 20 hours. Before committing to the whole stretch, I hope to complete it in seven pieces, by riding the train between stations. The segments would look something like this.


1.  Philadelphia-Ardmore, 2:00 hrs
2.  Ardmore-Paoli, 3:45 hours
3.  Paoli-Exton, 2:40 hours
4.  Exton-Downingtown, 1:45 hours
5.  Downingtown-Coatesville, 1:10 hours
6.  Coatesville-Parkesburg, 2:10 hours
7.  Parkesburg-Lancaster, 7:10 hours

Lancaster Barn Again

It is not every day that the words “Lancaster, Pennsylvania” enter the pages of The Economist. But on April 24, they did. “Heritage Protection: Barn Again” notes that Lancaster County has by far the largest concentration of barns in the whole country (p. 28). In fact, I pass through this very barned landscape as I read the magazine.

Saving America’s farming icon in the rest of the U.S. has been a losing battle. The iconic barn was a functional solution to old farming processes, where livestock occupied the ground floor, and grain (or hay) was stored in the upper floors. In 20th-century farming, grain farmers got rid of animals for mechanical combines and planters, while the livestock farmers preferred a long production line type of building. The 2007 U.S. census was the first to count barns, and we will not know the total loss until the next count in 2012. The data from Iowa alone is dramatic with 1,000 barns lost every year. “Barn Again” is a program that National Trust for Historic Preservation began after the 1980s farm crisis. The program gives advice and provides incentives. Some states (Washington, Vermont, Iowa) give grants or tax credits but, ultimately, the main challenge for barn preservation is finding alternative uses. The revival of organic farming has, to a small extent, made old barns relevant again.

The Wedding Photo: Lidoriki Object 116

In Summer 2016, a team of students photographed 136 objects from the Lidoriki Folklore Museum. Lizzy Wood, among the students, is currently working up this collection into a digital exhibition and catalog. Our process of writing up an academic catalog entry for each object involves an open-ended on-line conversation about what makes these objects interesting. Lizzy has given me the challenge of writing down some first thoughts. Here it goes.

A wedding photograph signifies the penetration of technological mediation in the lives of rural Greece. Portrait photography became a fundamental medium in late-19th-century socializing, through visitation cards, wedding or funeral images. Photographic studios opened in Athens but their story in provincial towns (like Amfisa) is less known. Photography played an additional pre-wedding role in Greek life through the phenomenon of “picture brides” during the great emigration of the 1890s-1920s. Single male immigrants in the U.S. had no access to eligible females. Co-patriots would send photographs of eligible brides from back home. These arranged long-distance marriages were the subject of a 2004 film Brides. This, of course, is not unique to Greeks and continues to play a courting role in migrant laborers across the globe (digitally).

But this is not a photo-bride, but a commemoration of the wedding day. It was most likely not taken on the actual wedding day, so it repeats the dress-up of that momentous event. The long exposure required in early photography necessitated the special lights that only a photo studio could make possible. Most of the early portraits are staged at the photo studio. Without electricity in homes, you could not have domestic interior photography until much later. Photo studios became both the place and the artistic agent for photography. In this process, the photo became an advertisement of the studio, which is why the studio is so prominently marked on the photo. Isn’t it interesting that the names of the wedding couple are not commemorated (and hence forgotten) but the name of the studio that photographed them is?

A few words about the studio. The studio of Euthymios Macheras was a prominent (perhaps the only) photographic studio in Amfissa, the closest city to Lidoriki. The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive contains a number of the studio’s photographs of couples, children, urban scenes (available digitally here). We have no date for the wedding photo, but it fits in the 1910-1930 range. If we did a thorough stylistic analysis of the wedding fashions, we might be able to narrow the range. 

The “Euth. Machairas. Photographic Studio, Amfisa” label at the lower right corner is interesting as a work of graphic design (my sketch left). It uses cursive, ornate letters for the name of the proprietor, but technocratic capital letters for the declaration of function. Graphically, it is a hybrid of artistic flair (top) and bureaucratic regularity (bottom).

Rather than looking at the most obvious – the objects, clothes, insignia of ceremonial dress – I look at clues on the architectural setting. My sketch (left) is a projected ground plan of the photographed space. Looking at the lower part of the portrait, one sees two courses of stone and a carpet. This is clearly not an indoor studio setup up but a photo in front of an actual house, and, even more, a house with a side-walk, so an urban house. What is puzzling is that there is no vertical house wall on the background, which is white. It seems to me that the photographer draped a cloth over the front of the house to create a blank slate. Now this is interesting in that it turns the street into a studio. The photo looks like a professional studio installation, but it was taken outdoors. A close look at the ground information also shows a textile draped over the sidewalk and placed right in front of the couple’s steps. During the ceremonial walk of wedding couple from their homes to the church, villagers used to drape the streets with carpets so that they never stepped on anything but a domesticated soft surface (think red-carpet at the Oscars). The striped fabric in front of the couple is such a carpet. Its striped design is visible, showing the parallel mechanism of the loom production. Although the carpet is traditional, the form of commemoration (photography) is modern as are the shoes that will step on the traditional carpet, most fashionable white high heels for the bride and shiny dressy black shoes for the groom. How does this help us reconstruct studio practices in Greece. First, it suggests that urban photo studios travelled outside of the studio and took wedding photographs in-situ. If the photo was indeed taking in Lidorki, then it would have been taken along its main street that would have included a side-walk. Second, the itinerant photographer brought along a fabric that they hang over the front of the house to disguise its architectural specificity, focus attention on the figures, and make it look as if they stepped into a studio.

Paradoxically, this is exactly how we took photos of our Lidoriki objects. We hang a plastic sheet that was backed with a photographic white fabric. Here, you see, our impromptu photo studio from the Lidoriki Folklore Museum.

Finally, I am intrigued by the frame. It is divided in two complementary zones, a smooth lacquered wood inside that transitions smoothly into the glass, and a carved wood outside that comes from the world of painting. The outer frame is not machine made but carved. It includes patterns of roses, florets, and leaves (detail sketch above).