A Tall Story, in Photos and Words

Arts4 MIN READ

The allure of obelisks captures the interest of Colby scholars Gary Green and Gianluca Rizzo

Gary Green, Washington Monument, Washington, D.C., 2017
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August 18, 2022

Photographer Gary Green and poet Gianluca Rizzo collaborated across disciplines and time to create the book Obelisks. Published by the Italian press Danila Montanari Editore, the book explores in quiet black-and-white photographs and layered text the enduring intrigue of obelisks as markers of time, history, and human activity.

Tall and narrow like its subject, the softcover monograph presents two dozen images of various Roman monuments and a series of poems about uniquely American monuments. Green, a Colby professor of art, includes entire monuments in some of his images, while focusing on details and surrounding neighborhoods in others. All made with film, the photographs lead viewers to ponder the relationship between Rome, the monoliths, and neighborhoods they occupy. Rizzo, the Paul D. and Marilyn Paganucci Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature, wrote a series of poems, in English, based on such American monuments as Bunker Hill near Boston, San Jacinto in Texas, and the recently destroyed Georgia Guidestones. Rizzo’s poems reflect and interpret the words carved into stone, the people who carved them, and the stories they tell.

Obelisks opens with the Latin phrase Nec Ventos Nec Hiemem, which translates as “neither wind nor winter.” Taken from one of the obelisks pictured in the book, the phrase suggests the permanent nature of monuments. Noting that history is always up for debate, one reviewer said of the book, “… This beautiful little, physically unimposing volume functions as a guidebook not so much to specific places or even eras, but as a guide to ways of thinking about and questioning history, the histories that surround us, which we move through every day, whether in a foreign land or closer to home.”

Gary Green, Pantheon, Piazza della Rotonda, Rome, 2016. (Detail)

AMERICAN OBELISK NO. 5
(Bunker Hill Monument)

Gary Green, Untitled, Piazza Navona, Rome, 2016

AMERICAN BODIES
(Coda)


Obelisks book cover

For information about the book and to order a copy, visit Photo-Eye Bookstore.


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