Pompeii Revealed Through the Lens

ON VIEW: April 2–May 11 / 2025
Williams Center Gallery · 317 Hamilton Street

This exhibition investigates the city of Pompeii through the camera’s lens, exploring how various technologies have been used to educate, explore, celebrate, and remember this ancient city. The exhibition centers on a series of photographs by American photographer William Wylie, who drew inspiration from the late 19th-century works of Giorgio Sommer, the first photographer to document the unearthed city.

Edge of peristyle (Pompeian building) | 2013 | Pigment print | William Wylie ©

The exhibit connects art and science, exploring how scientific images, like those from petrographic and scanning electron microscopes, help us understand Pompeii’s history at the scale of individual ash particles, volcanic gas bubbles, and crystals grown from magma.