A Small Pictorial Treasury of Columns
A curated, free to use, public domain or “no known copyright” collection of 822 images of columns throughout history, derived from Flickr Commons.
Notes ~
On the Greek island of Evia (Εύβοια), I walked up a mountain, some three kilometres from the sea, to an ancient Roman column quarry. The half finished stone columns, some more than 12 metres long, that remained, were reminders of that astonishing physical labour our common ancestors exerted on the natural world, in order, at least in part, that humanity was elevated towards the divine.
This collection came about when I was researching columns for some new sculptural work on the incredible Flickr Commons online resource. Out of my initial search, I was stunned by the depth and variety of images of columns, which seemed somehow, to represent an entire history of human endeavour - beauty, architecture, function. The columns of history are strong, gigantic, sometimes shattered, like broken femurs - many of them still hold up the roofs for which they were installed. They simultaneously represent to me a sheer will: the human as a force of nature, as well as the inevitable erosion of institutions and power over time.
I selected photos, mostly of mediaeval European and Egyptian structures, engravings and drawings. Below is a representative sample of the whole archive. It is fairly low resolution, but the images contained therein could doubtless be used for all sorts of interesting projects.
