Criticism and Legacy
Recent critics such as Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (in Antiquity and Photography, Getty Museum, 2005) have argued that Stillman's photography, especially an album of views of the Athenian Acropolis, displayed an artistic sensibility and a genius of a higher order than the rest of his work. The first series was photographed in 1869 and privately published in 1870; Stillman rephotographed the Acropolis in 1882 and subsequently reordered the combined series in a second album. Stillman's photographs, in their daring perspectives, in their creative synthesis (inspired by Ruskinian ideas) of aesthetic feeling and a scientific/scholarly perspective on architectural form, and in their incorporation of the Greek landscape and the modern Greek context of ancient ruins, show a startlingly modern sensibility for their time, a way of seeing utterly different from the commercial photography of contemporary Greeks and foreigners, whose representations tended to cater to the set expectations of the foreign philhellenic and touristic market.
Read more about this topic: William James Stillman
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