This conversation is presented as part of the public programming for the exhibition Women and Ruins: Archaeology, Photography, and Landscape on show at the Academy until November 9, 2025. 

Photography aided in the formation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and participated in the transformations of how people saw the world around them. In the final years of the Grand Tour, photography became increasingly available as a technology. Tourists made and acquired photographs of the sites they visited and the people they visited them with. A rising interest in analyzing sites, and excavating them to understand them better, prompted new methods of recording such as scale drawing and photography. Film photographs famously have the quality of appearing to be a simple indexical record of what was before the camera, and yet photography can equally be open to experimentation and innovation. 

Along with its role in reshaping thinking about archaeological facts, early photography captures the social relationships at archaeological sites. Photographs from major excavation projects, such as those at Rome, Pompeii and elsewhere in the ancient world, capture images of workers who are otherwise unknown, reflect paradigms and norms designed by the photographer, who set up the tableau of the photograph. Women often took up the camera. As the exhibition Women and Ruins makes clear, women of the early twentieth century used photography, and photography of archaeology, distinctively. 

This evening’s event brings together two archaeologists who have examined the use of photography in early archaeology. They will each give a short lecture on how the technology prompted new ways of thinking about evidence in the study of the human past, and the particular role played by women in photography. By comparing various contexts where photography played a critical role in excavation and documentation, from Dura Europos to Pompeii, scholars Jen Baird and Sophie Hay will interrogate the relationships between the two fields within the framework of new ideas about gender and women’s independence. 

Jen Baird 

Trouble Focusing: Looking for Women in the Archaeological Photography of the Middle East 

Drawing on archaeological photographs of and by women in the Middle East in the first decades of the twentieth century, this talk will explore the ways that photographs of archaeology by women such as Gertude Bell shaped the field, but also the way that photographs of women on archaeological projects served to reproduce existing norms. Through photographs from a variety of Middle Eastern archaeological sites including Palmyra and Dura-Europos, Baird asks in what ways photography by women contributed to different visions of archaeology, and what way visions of archaeology held women back. 

Sophie Hay 

Underexposed: Tatiana Warscher, the Forgotten Photographer in Pompeii 

Pompeii was captured through the lens from the advent of photography in the mid 19th-century and it was always a man behind the camera: from the romance of Giorgio Sommer’s and Giacomo Brogi’s deserted ruins to the photographs of Vittorio Spinazzola’s excavations taken by his son, Guido. However, in 1923 an unlikely figure arrived in Pompeii who was to change the focus of photography in the ancient site. Tatiana Warscher, a Russian woman who had fled the Revolution in her homeland, came to Pompeii and soon became one of the most revered scholars of the ancient city. Events after her death meant her name fell into obscurity despite her photographic archive remaining an incalculable resource. Hay will discuss Tatiana’s photographs in the context of her work and explore how she helped reframe Pompeian scholarship. 

Speakers: 

Jen Baird, FSA, MAE, is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her work focusses on archaeological archives, both as sources for previously ignored data such as graffiti and household assemblages, and as subjects themselves which can enable the study of the history of archaeology and the formation of archaeological knowledge, particularly through photography. She is on the editorial board of Archive Archaeology, and has recently published on archive archaeology in the Journal of Social Archaeology and the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies. 

Sophie Hay, FSA, is a Roman archaeologist currently working in the Press Office of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. She is researching women who excavated in Pompeii and has contributed a section on this topic to the current onsite exhibition Being a Woman in Ancient Pompeii. Her passion for Pompeii was ignited while at the British School at Rome when she worked on the ‘Insula I.9 Pompeii Project’, which sought to understand daily life in a block of Roman houses. She was a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge helping to develop a free history course for schools based on her excavations in Pompeii and is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London. She has featured on a number of history podcasts and television documentaries, including the recent BBC’s ‘Pompeii: The New Dig’. 

The exhibition Women and Ruins: Archaeology, Photography, and Landscape will open on September 17 from 5:30pm to 8:00pm. Regular exhibition hours are Friday and Saturday from 4:00pm to 7:00pm until November 9, 2025. The catalogue for Women & Ruins: Archaeology, Photography, and Landscape is published by Allemandi (Torino) and will be presented on October 3 at the Fondazione Rovati in Milan. Authors include Martina Caruso, Caroline Goodson, Raffaella Silvestri, and Ilaria Puri Purini.

By comparing various contexts where photography played a critical role in excavation, from Dura Europos to Pompeii, scholars Jen Baird and Sophie Hay will interrogate the relationships between the two fields.