This paper examines the intertwined histories of archaeology and photography to explore how the ‘authentic’ past is produced, stabilized, and circulated. Beginning with the emergence of archaeology in the nineteenth century – a moment marked by new technologies of observation and intensified ideological investments – the study shows how claims to authenticity have always depended on material, visual, and institutional mediations. Drawing on philosophical, anthropological, and visual-cultural perspectives, the paper distinguishes between indexical authenticity, grounded in empirical procedures of verification, and experiential authenticity, which relies on affective and aesthetic responses to material traces. Photography appears as the pivotal medium through which these forms converge: its indexical connection to the real lends archaeological images epistemic authority, while its aesthetic conventions shape how the past is imagined and emotionally apprehended. Yet archaeological photographs are not neutral records; they participate in visual regimes that isolate, frame, and monumentalize selected fragments, transforming them into icons of continuity and identity. Through the case of modern Greece, the paper demonstrates how archaeology and photography mutually reinforced national narratives by purifying landscapes, reorganizing urban space, and disseminating a sanitized classical ideal. Ultimately, authenticity emerges not as an inherent property of objects but as a relational effect of practices – technical, representational, ideological – that mediate the relation between past and present
Dimitris Kargiotis (Tue,) studied this question.