Antonino Salinas - The archaeologist behind the lens

The numerous cities he visited included Berlin, Athens, and London. Abroad, Salinas was able to broaden his knowledge of archaeological excavation techniques and meet eminent scholars considered as the founders of the history of antiquity as a science, such as Theodor Mommsen.

Salinas was appointed as Associate Professor of Archaeology in Palermo in 1865, the first teacher in the Kingdom of Italy to hold this position. He believed in the need for close and intensive collaboration among scholars in order to ensure an effective advancement of knowledge, and saw continuous dialogue between teachers and students as the lifeblood of a subject.

His investigations covered the entire island, from Salemi, Solunto and Palermo to Taormina and Tindari, and from Selinunte to Lilybaeum (now Marsala) and Mozia.

The explorations unearthed sculptures, architectural structures, coins, jewellery and inscriptions of various eras, from prehistory to the Middle Ages.

Each individual object was seen as essential for understanding the history of the civilisations of ancient Sicily. Salinas documented the findings and excavation work with precision and scrupulousness.

His intense photographic activity was concentrated over a period of time ranging from 1886 to 1913, and produced approximately 3,000 images. He approached photography with scientific rigour and method, as seen from the manuals of photographic technique in his library, taking notes in his notebooks on the photographs taken, lighting conditions, the type of camera used, lenses, exposure, development formulas, etc.

He was aware that photography provided a suitable tool, not only for documenting works of art, but also for protecting them.

In a letter addressed to the Ministry on the results of the excavations at Selinunte in 1893, he states: “...After the delivery of the objects to this museum, I will send the Ministry a final report accompanied by the photographs that I have taken.”

Although he was not a professional, his images show an adequate and appropriate choice of view point, framing and lighting to enhance the subject and material.

Salinas’ photographic archive is sometimes the only surviving record of his excavations, the results of which were not always published, and it preserves people, himself and the daily work for posterity.

The photographs of characters in traditional costumes, of which he was a tireless collector, show his ethnographical interests as a realist.

The desire to portray human attachment to the remnants of the past is clearly seen in many of his pictures. Salinas felt a strong desire to recover the past as a collective memory in order to build the future.

His perspective is like that of a traveller, capable of recording details that might escape the direct perception of the observer. Photographs taken during excursions, often with a familiar subject, allow us to appreciate landscapes that have now been transformed by human activity.

Salinas declared in the island’s Visitor’s Book that he had been “a Moytian since 1855”.

His images of the symbolic monuments of antiquity find fitting commentary in the romantic thoughts of contemporary and earlier European travellers.

“The temple of Segesta seems to have been placed at the foot of the mountain by a genius to whom the only point in which to erect it was revealed. It alone animates the vastness of the landscape, which it vivifies and divinely enhances” (Guy de Maunpassant).

A century earlier, reaching Taormina on 7 May 1787, J.W. Goethe wrote: “Whatever natural form it had, art has contributed to make it a semi-circular theatre for spectators. […] Sitting higher up, where the members of the audience once sat, it has to be said that never, perhaps, has a theatre audience beheld such a sight before it.”