Photos

The New Colisseum

For this picture the title "modern ruins" has a slightly different meaning than in my last one of the same name. There something new had decomposed; here something ancient and ruined is resurrected.

I’ve never much liked photographs of high-rise buildings. I don’t mind being in them, even living in them (I love that view!). But as portrait subjects they’ve always seemed pretty limited and generic, so this photo is a bit of a departure for me.

When I saw this particular building on Saturday it struck me as different. I liked its intentionally unfinished look, and that swoop of concrete on the right. Besides, there was a good sky that day, so I took its picture.

But this building also struck a chord in my memory that I couldn’t identify until I saw the image on my computer and realized that it looked like the Roman Colosseum, though in a mirror image (the portions that survived damage on the original, and that therefore protrude upward on the left hand side, are converted into the decorative structure on the right).

Maybe others won’t see it the same way, but I like the overlay of historical and modern images that this association evokes for me. It’s disjointed, even slightly disturbing, like something from a J.G. Ballard novel (perhaps this one).

I picture fierce gladiatores doing battle in the corridors of this antiseptic structure, to the shouts of a crowd seated behind those silent windows. Meanwhile, in the original Colosseum, no one fights any more except the tourists who pass through and the cats who live there.

(I had titled this morituri te salutant, the cry of "those about to die salute you" which the gladiators gave to the emperor before doing battle with each other or wild animals, but in deference to those who, like me, don't speak Latin, I decided to rename it and relegated the old title to this footnote.)