Anthony Hernandez: Pictures for Rome

''Anthony Hernandez's "Pictures for Rome" (1998-99), made while he was a fellow at the American Academy, make no reference to any iconic images of that historic city and its famous edifices. Instead, these elegantly disturbing color photographs examine what could be considered a series of unofficial urban monuments composed from the distressed architectural elements and detritus found inside abandoned buildings..."Pictures for Rome" are pictures of haunted places. Whether they chronicle the bones and viscera of an aborted commercial structure or never-finished hospital, a vacant housing complex or long-deserted schoolhouse, these images engage the ghostly relic of urban renewal, the failed construction projects and real estate disasters that conjure modernism's less glamorous side. And they remind us that even in Rome, the mother city, everything is disposable... "Pictures for Rome" are not, in other words, the same thing as pictures "of" Rome. These images do not describe a specific city at all; instead, they chart concealed landscapes that exist in a world apart from the vitality and velocity of today's consumerist metropolis...A deep undersea silence seems to engulf the modern ruins that Hernandez photographs... Blurring the line dividing past and present, they leave our temporal compass spinning wildly.''--Ralph Rugoff