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Every photograph is a crystallised moment in time. The HEIR Project digital image archive, part of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, holds more than 50,000 such wonders. The pictures come primarily from university teaching collections dating back as far as the 1860s. The early use of photographic images in classrooms demonstrates that using the latest technology is a long Oxford tradition. Images, both old and new, reveal sites that range from those lost forever to others unchanged since the first lantern slides came to the university collections. They are the legacy of many photographers, some famous in their lifetimes but now little discussed, others whose work has become anonymous with the passage of time.
The selected image is by the German photographer Giorgio Sommer, who spent much of his life in Naples, creating a pioneering set of images from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Born Georg Sommer in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1834, he became an apprentice photographer in 1853, shortly after the start of modern photography in 1849. Going to Naples in 1857, he opened a photographic studio, rechristened as Giorgio Sommer. He sold images of Italian tourist attractions and street scenes to travellers in the form of prints, postcards, photo albums, and glass lantern slides. Sommer first photographed Pompeii in 1863. He worked in partnership with another German photographer, Edmondo Behles, who had a studio in Rome from 1866 to 1874. The partners exhibited work at international exhibitions across Europe, winning numerous awards. When the partnership ended, Sommer formed a business with his son. The lantern slide scanned to make this image came from this venture, G. Sommer and Son. Images from other Mediterranean destinations joined Giorgio Sommer’s work from Italy. He was active as a photographer until 1888, dying in 1914. There are 48 Sommer-related images in HEIR, including photographs he took, along with images taken by Oxford Professor John L Myres, an archaeologist and academic, who sold some of his negatives to G. Sommer and Son.
The image above was a crop of a wider shot (G. Sommer No.1256) used to produce the lantern slide. It shows a fountain in the garden at the House of the Hanging Balcony, which was first being excavated when Giorgio Sommer made his initial visit to Pompeii in 1863. An internet search provides additional 19th-century views of the fountain area like this one, and a few early 20th-century ones, but none after that date. It appears that public access to this area ceased at that time. Modern online views show only a portion of this area, which is visible beyond a steel gate. The fountain, if it is still in situ, is now unseen by tourists. The work of Giorgio Sommer and of other early photographers has bequeathed a priceless record, documenting changes in both the physical state of antique structures and changes in the way they are managed for public access.
Further information: Visit HEIR, the Historic Environment Image Resource, at http://heir.arch.ox.ac.uk to see our Sommer image set.
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