Somewhere in the Braccio Nuovo — the New Wing of the Vatican Museums — I stopped in front of a marble face that at first I did not recognize. Peering into the now empty eyes, I realized it was the Mask of Medusa, carved during the reign of Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD, originally placed on the Temple of Venus and Roma in the Roman Forum as a protective element, an apotropaic guardian meant to avert evil from one of Rome's most powerful imperial buildings. This version of her belongs to the Rondanini type — not the terrifying Greek monster with snakes for hair, but something far more unsettling and true: portraying her as the tragically beautiful woman she was, at the precise moment of her death. I raised my Nikon F100, loaded with 35mm film, and moved in until her face filled the frame almost entirely — the details held me still, the surface of her face weathered by nearly two thousand years, the marble worn into something softer and more uncertain than the myth ever allowed her to be. The edges of the composition fall away into darkness. There is no body, no context, no Perseus, no mirror. Just her face, and what time has done to it. She was always meant to be looked at, to be revered, admired. She was a protector. But somehow, now only remembered as a monster. Absence is about the lack of context we often experience life in, never fully realizing what we are looking at, the history it holds, the realities of its past — and how that may evoke its future. This archival giclée print is held in an ornate antique gold wood frame, the kind usually reserved for portraits of the powerful and the commemorated — which, in the end, is exactly what this is. This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.
