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last ones standing
It’s hard to find words to describe what I saw in the Valley of the Temples. And my photos don’t do it justice, either.
These are the remains of the Temple of Heracles; it is considered to be the most ancient of the temples, dating to the end of the 6th century BCE. It was destroyed by an earthquake and all that’s left are eight columns.
(To put this into perspective a little bit, the city I live in dates all the way back to 1884.)
Valley of the Temples
Agrigento, Sicily
photographed 9.2.2022
old + new
So, while I have broken through my own personal barrier and have begun to include people in my photos, I still didn’t want to include people who were tourists in my images from the Valley of the Temples. (Habits die hard and etc.) Because it’s the top tourist destinations in Sicily, I sort of set myself up for…failure? disappointment?
But this kid ran by and I broke my own rule.
Valley of the Temples
Agrigento, Sicily
photographed 9.32.2022
temple minimalism
What a place this was – the Valley of the Temples, an array of 4th and 5th century BCE temples near the modern (and also ancient) Sicilian town of Agrigento. The temples were built by ancient Greeks, but were re-purposed over the centuries by Carthaginians and Romans; it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The temples play homage to the Greek gods and goddesses as well as the deities of subsequent cultures. (This site gives a good summary of the history of the ruins.)
It was breathtaking to stand among these ancient places and to think about all the people who found this particular location to be important – for sacred reasons or for strategic ones. It was hard to photograph. That much history is hard to capture through a lens, and anyway, it’s been photographed a billion times and who am I to think I could see anything any differently than what all the photographers who were there before me had already seen and photographed.
For reasons known only to my brain (and it’s not letting out any information on the matter), shooting some minimalist images of the place seemed like the thing I needed to do. And so I did.
Valley of the Temples
Agrigento, Sicily
photographed 9.2.2022
One Day | One Image 