New York, NY The AXA Gallery presents The New World’s Old World: Photographic Views of Ancient America, a single venue exhibition surveying photographic images of ancient American archeology from the beginning photography to the present. Organized by independent curator May Castleberry, the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated companion volume of five essays considering the achievements of Edward Ranney, Max Vargas, Martin Chambi, Josef Albers and other well known photographers. Both the exhibition and book consider the ways in which the complex creations of ancient American civilizations – extending over vast time and space, and accordingly rich and diverse – have been conceived and reconceived in the past century and a half.

Martin Chambi Two-Panel Panoramic View of Machu Picchu, Peru, ca. 1945 Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

The exhibition relates the aesthetic achievements of photographers as they encountered evidence of a little known American past over the last 160 years, while documenting the discovery and rediscovery of ancient remains and the attempt to understand the cultures that created them. Through the selection of some 100 photographs and interpretive materials, the exhibition demonstrates how photography, whether in service to other disciplines or as an independent medium both reflected and shaped changing perceptions of the ancient past, while it “conserved” images of physical structures that have themselves changed over time.

Marilyn Bridges Yarn and Needle #1, 1979, Nazca, Peru Gelatin Silver Print Collection of Marilyn Bridges

New World’s Old World is organized by May Castleberry, independent curator, and presented by The AXA Gallery. The AXA Gallery is sponsored by AXA Financial and its subsidiary The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. Additional assistance has been provided by AXA Art Insurance Corporation.

New World’s Old World charts the emergence and evolution of photography in conjunction with archaeology, architectural history, ethnography, and other fields, and considers how it interacted with them to investigate the past and eventually to shape modern Americans’ ideas of ancient America and ancient Americans. The exhibition evokes the photographic transformation of the art of the past into the art of the present with evocative images by both noted practitioners and less recognized observers. As ancient sites in the New World were discovered and examined, scientists and explorers, as well as amateurs and ordinary travelers, turned to the new medium of photography to record, clarify, and aid in interpreting what they saw. Over time, photography would assume more autonomy, no longer strictly subordinate to other fields and purposes in documenting ancient remains. The works collected in the exhibition exemplify the energetic and varied responses to well known and lesser-known sites in Mesoamerica, the southwestern United States, the Andean region, and elsewhere in the two continents.

The diverse array of photographers entails several motives and results; moreover, their works reflect changes in societal attitudes toward the past and modernity, and the increasing independence of the medium. Among the representative images are Catherwood and Stephens’ chronicle of a ground-breaking expedition to Mexico in the 1840s; British archaeologist Alfred Percival Maudslay’s magnificent views of Palenque from the 1880s; Laura Gilpin’s romantic visions of Mesa Verde, marketed for a new era of archaeological tourism in the 1920s; the first “aerial archaeology” of southwestern and mesoamerican ruins, executed by fliers of the Peruvian air force and Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s; and the personal interpretations of such established masters as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Aaron Siskind, and Linda Connor.

Edward Ranney Nohuch Mul, Coba, Mexico, 1972 Museum of Modern Art, New York

A book accompanying the exhibition, published by the University of New Mexico Press and edited by curator May Castleberry, includes 100 photographs and five essays by noted scholars. The book examines the way in which photography, in its encounters with ancient American remains, ignited the artistic, cultural, and political imagination of contemporary society. Kathleen Howe, a scholar of archeological photography and Pre-Columbian art, contributes a historical survey of photography of ancient monuments of Mesoamerica. Cultural historian Martha Sandweiss traces the ambitions of photographers in the southwestern United States, from early expeditionary documenters to later, more self-conscious fine artists. An essay by photographer Edward Ranney focuses on pre-Columbian Inca sites, and on the differing approaches of native and foreign photographers in Peru. And in an appendix focused on specific Old World sites in the New World, Georgia de Havenon describes physical structures and settings, history and discovery, exploration and excavation in Canyon de Chelly and Mesa Verde in the United States; Chichén Itzá, Mitla, Teotihuacán, and Palenque, Mexico; Nazca and Machu Picchu, Peru; and other locations. (280 pages (9.5 x 8.75), 75 duotone photographs and 3 maps. ISBN#0-8263-2971-3, Distributed by University of New Mexico Press, $47.50) The book is available at Gateway Newstand in the Equitable Atrium, 787 Seventh Avenue.

May Castleberry, Independent Curator, is the editor of a series of artist’s books published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As editor of a new series, Contemporary Editions, published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art, she edited Coisa Linda (Something Beautiful) by Brazilian artist and painter Beatriz Milhazes, in December of 2002. She has organized some twenty artist’s books for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York as well as its exhibition catalogue Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West.

Thomas M. Easterly Big Mound During Destruction, St. Louis, Missouri, 1869 Daguerreotype, half-plate Collection of the Missouri Historical Society

AXA Gallery presents works from all fields of the visual arts, with a special emphasis placed on exhibitions that would not otherwise have a presence in the city. The AXA Gallery is located in the atrium lobby of Equitable Tower, 787 Seventh Avenue at 51st Street, in New York City. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11am - 6pm, and Saturday, noon to 5pm. The Gallery is closed on Sundays. Admission is free.