This paper was written for the Doing Photography conference at Durham University, UK, in 2013.

This paper was written for the Visual Literacies 5 conference at Oxford University in 2011. Despite its age, it still offers insight into the challenges of visually documenting historic preservation work.

Photographs are artifacts of moments past and forever lost. They provide a “fugitive testimony” to history (Camera Lucida 93). Throughout his work, Roland Barthes examines photography’s mnemonic features that testify to the absence of the subject depicted while simultaneously giving evidence that it existed. Barthes regards architecture as a visible index to the past and explains that ancient societies built structures to immortalize themselves.