Pompeii Revealed Through the Lens

ON VIEW: April 2–May 16 / 2025

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.

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.