Invisible Gods
Architectural photographer Quintin Lake describes his encounter with the Grecian frieze, now presented as the Pergamon Alter in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, and how he saw not only the beauty of history and art, but also the gaps between.

When I first saw the fragments of the Pergamon Altar in Berlin, I was surprised and delighted that the negative space surrounding the sculpture fired up my imagination more than the artworks themselves. It felt that the culturally imagined images projected on the blank panels were more potent than the beautifully resolved frieze itself, which was a distinctly contemporary experience of appreciating an artwork at odds with the classical subject.  

The space between the statues also implied the violence of the original temple's fragmentation through time and colonial overtones of extracting the stones from Greece to Berlin. The vacuum between the fragments could also symbolise a chasm between the original use as elements of religious ceremony and of contemporary tourism.

In a certain way, this disorienting representation of the Greek Gods seems more truthful in the modern age: fragments of a lost world incongruous against the blank orthogonal moment that can never entirely discard the influence, imagery, and architecture of the classical past.









Quintin Lake is a British architectural and landscape photographer. Having originally trained as an architect, leading to his interest in geometry and structure, he moved into photographic projects responding to long landscape walks and looking at aspects of the built environment.
From 2015-2020 he walked 11,000km around the coast of Britain for a photography project called The Perimeter, the results of which he is currently editing and publishing at the www.theperimeter.uk.
www.quintinlake.com

images

fig.i-viii Demeter, Heracles, Ephiatles, Themis, Theia, Ares, Moirae, & gorgons. All photographs from the series Invisible Gods, 2013, based on the spaces between the fragments of the Pergamon Altar, Berlin, Germany. Signed and editioned prints available at 42x42cm, 80x80cm

publication date
19 January 2022

tags
Artwork, Berlin, Greece, Pergamon Altar, Photography, Quintin Lake