A Piece of String My Height

various sites in Istanbul and southern Turkey

1998

At various sites throughout Turkey, ranging from ancient cites in southern Turkey to Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman sites in Istanbul, I placed and photographed a piece of string my height. The photographs evoke a set of related themes: self-portraiture, the me-at-the-monument genre of tourist photographs, the creation and loss of scale, the history and function of the monument, and the mark human presence leaves on the natural world.