A Tall Story, in Photos and Words
The allure of obelisks captures the interest of Colby scholars Gary Green and Gianluca Rizzo
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.”
AMERICAN OBELISK NO. 5
(Bunker Hill Monument)
this most unnatural rebellion of Quincey granite standing on union in the shape of a spoon or a half-buried egg a kind of small pocket dagger furnished with knives, although they were soon proved useless for anything but cooking they desired, therefore, to substitute an instrument of more general utility for the bullet is foolish, the bayonette wise and the doctrine was largely based around the concept of reach and a Boston ship rigger built a special hoisting apparatus and the first commercial railway in America was born farmers, tradespeople, and merchants from every level of society —as they are wont to do— and General Gage found his army encircled for the first time in pitched battle and built an earthen fort to avoid further harassment they set the town on fire struggled to control their own destiny countless scores of individuals interested in our nation’s founding solicited from the public properly, a glacial drumlin open and easy of ascent, and, in short, would be easily carried a fish, a pine tree and a quiver of arrows like a bunch of asparagus and Admiral Graves awoke irritated by the gunfire and John Tyler was present and Daniel Webster his face like a Maine lobster and the stone wall on the Mystic River at the rail fence the statue of William Prescott with his new hat e le du’ dita de romoletto and yet, to set forth Particulars of his conduct would be tedious the largest highway construction project in the U.S. I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price and the cables evoke imagery of the riggings the white of their eyes and two additional lanes are cantilevered outside fourteen elephants crossed the new bridge for it is widely believed that these animals have uncanny instincts and will not cross unsafe structures that they might erect upon it within their imperishable obelisk this model to be inserted with the appropriate ceremonies (e non perché son pesanti)
AMERICAN BODIES
(Coda)
I want you to write me a letter a series of abductions with a great deal of composure an exhortation to forgetfulness an echo of lesser talent a less hazardous pursuit as you enter the cathedral you are at the bottom of the ocean: growing like exogenous plants standing beneath these serene skies measuring with their bodies the breath of vast empires built on piles of their own driving to them, a man has not two arms he has eight, he has sixteen, he has twenty, he is pierced all over with arms luminous circumferences, flowers, forces like the postcards they sell in India our molting season must be a crisis easily quieted by a naked thief no better than wooden horses the ally of tyranny the opponent of material prosperity the foe of thrift the enemy of the railroad, the caucus, and the school approving that our bodies of a stony nature are positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind hunted down and caught and carried back but I bite my lip and keep quiet a tedious low-water trip on a steam boat from Louisville to St. Louis our progress in degeneracy appears to be rapid if my facts were false my words were wrong- but were my facts false? with a task greater than that who can go with me and remain with you down to the last period of recorded time but in a larger sense pretty much all the ingredients and trappings of domestic dementia and prudence pity us who always battle on the frontier of the boundless new hands will grow new doors will sprout for the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine
For information about the book and to order a copy, visit Photo-Eye Bookstore.