Photographer Domenico Albamonte is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Melancholy of the Ancient World’. To see Domenico’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The metamorphoses of those ancient relics recall the journey of anyone’s identity. Time reveals the fractures along hidden lines of frailty, and different fragments need to be recomposed to make sense of a life experience.

Ce n’est jamais qu’un moment… (Antinous)

In that search for meanings, human existence struggles between unlimited desire and a finite body, and is trapped in an aspiration for perfection that is never attainable. Beauty, that transient and fragile good, is realized to be no more than a fraction of time, lost at the very moment it is caught. The impulse that makes us feel similar to gods is inevitably frustrated.

Photography enters into relations with different dimensions of time: with the present, in documentary and reportage photography; with the past when photographs are records of personal memories and traces of one’s life experience and biography. More difficult is to express the relation of photography with the timeless, i.e. with the absolute, permanent, invariable dimensions of human existence. This is where photography enters into an exploration of symbols, a search for meanings and purposes beyond appearances.

Along this line of research is the series “Melancholy of the Ancient World”: images of ancient sculptures from the Greek and Roman antiquity are the medium for an existential reflection on time, beauty, and values.

The ancient sculptures emerge from darkness, the grazing light revealing surfaces marked by fractures, abrasions, amputations, as signs impressed on the bodies by time as the defining inherent condition of human existence.

Beauty Will Save the World (Bathing Aphrodites)

Against the illusions of relative goods, moral perfection is looked for as a way to strengthen ourselves against the injuries of time and fate. For the ancient Romans, the word “vis” meant both the physical and the moral strength; and the purpose of philosophia was to build in the scholar’s psyche an inner fortress untouched by the outer world and the common men’s false opinions.

Nevertheless, that mighty sculptor, Time, uninterruptedly shapes our body and mind according to a design that is never completed. For our existence is never definitive nor univocal but forever metamorphosing and constantly looking for the lost part of the whole itself.

The provisional conclusion is that all opposites – beauty and decay, male and female, the instant and the eternity – are the same: for light to exist, shadow is necessary; and when the light fades, shadow slips after it.

Domenico Albamonte - alias Luminis Imago. Born in Palermo (Sicily) in 1970 and living in Rome, I'm an amateur photographer. My preferred photographic genres are the creative reproduction of artworks and the contemporary urban-social landscape. I also engage in documenting actions by civil and social rights movements. My visual poetic is an investigation into the flow of inner time, the disquiet of existence, the symbols of the metaphysical. My visual language is mostly in black and white, which I believe to be the true quintessence of photography.

All images and text © Domenico Albamonte