Last week DART experienced some technical problems. In the course of retrenching, I overlooked some important information in Thursday's post: Photographer Beth Dow is represented in New York City by Jen Bekman. Having seen her work myself, I can say that the prints must be seen to be appreciated.

Here is a look at Dow's recent series, Ruins, accompanied by an extract from the artist's statement.

Left: Colosseum. Right: Trojan Horse. Copyright the artist, courtesy Jen Bekman.

These are the first photographs in a new portfolio that looks at the ways we appropriate and approximate the romance of ruins into modern American environments, and what this says about our longing for historic precedents. While genuine ruins remind us of our own mortality, they also suggest the opposite by showing it's possible to endure, even if only in a reduced and degraded form.

I have been looking at [19^th-century] photographs by Francis Frith, Felix Bonfils, and Giorgio Sommer, as well as sepia ink and wash drawings by Claude Lorrain, a 17th century artist who used classical ruins to create ideal scenes of pastoral splendor. My pictures of faked antiquities are an attempt to evoke nostalgia for inaccurate history, to wrestle with ideas of authenticity, and to question the value we place on Classical ideals. It is natural to challenge the relevance of nostalgic longing, and I exploit this dynamic in my contemporary landscapes.

I approach these pictures as a tourist. These real sites are all shot with a hand-held medium format camera, and include whatever clutter exists around the actual subjects. I also use a slightly wide-angle lens to exploit the sense of disorder through converging verticals. People mill around as they do in Frith's photographs. Life goes on. Unlike the heavily retouched wet-collodion/albumen originals, my film records clouds and other details, so I leave it all in. As my original references are beautiful objects, I honor that beauty by using the Victorian hand-coated platinum process. Platinum is rare, precious, and the most permanent photographic printing medium - an apt metaphor for my search for the authentic and enduring.

Beth Dow's luminous platinum palladium prints can be seen by appointment at Jen Bekman, 6 Spring Street, New York, NY. 212.219.0166. Take a look at Dow's prints available through Bekman's 20x200 project.