Some 7,000 photographs were taken over the course of the South Etruria Survey, a BSR archaeological survey that covered 1,000 square kilometres of land and recorded over 2,000 sites between 1955 and 1975. It was these photographs that brought me to Rome.

The photographs are an invaluable archaeological tool. They contribute to viewing monuments now lost, tracing the differences between landscapes of the twentieth century and today, and understanding the methods of investigation used by survey participants. The South Etruria Survey photographs are, however, also part of an archaeological survey that my PhD project probes as an artistic and social practice. While this is but a partial view of the material, it sets the foundations for examining the ways of seeing terrain and antiquity in these photographs and allows for an exploration of their entanglement with the intellectual ideas around which their visual knowledge is constructed.

While in Rome I was able to look through all the photographs and compile a selection that would form the primary case studies for my PhD. I also engaged with the BSR library's vast resources on the artistic and topographical landscape around Rome. This research has contributed to a major section of my PhD that locates the South Etruria Survey photographs in the landscape tradition. Taking the photographs as interpretive ‘frames’ that were used to engage with the ancient past, I suggest that the visuality of the South Etruria Survey is built upon an anxiety about loss and preservation of archaeological and cultural heritage, and its repositioning in the post-war period. These sentiments of anxiety and preservation can be located in various contexts: from the Monuments Men and the Unione, in which John Bryan Ward-Perkins was instrumental, to the changing face of the Italian landscape as a result of the Land Reform Scheme, and the rethinking of antiquity in Italy that occurred in the post-war period in response to its treatment by the Fascist regime.