Alison Frantz

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Mary Alison Frantz (born September 27, 1903 in Duluth, Minnesota , † February 1, 1995 in New Brunswick ) was an American classical and Byzantine archaeologist and photographer . For more than 30 years she was associated with the Agora excavation of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens , from 1939 to 1964 as chief excavation photographer.

John K. Papadopoulos counts Frantz, alongside Walter Hege and Max Hirmer, among the outstanding photographers of Greek antiquity.

Life and academic career

Alison Frantz was the youngest of five children. Her father, Alfred J. Frantz, a newspaper editor in Duluth, died when she was three years old. Until she was 15, she was homeschooled by her liberal mother, Mary Katherine (Gibson) Frantz. Frantz also had a close relationship with this later, a written conversation spanning 23 years can be found among the legacies.

Frantz first studied at Smith College , where she received her BA in 1924 . During this time, she initially focused on antiquity . In 1925 she came to Greece for the first time, and again in 1927 for a short visit, without having any positive feelings for the country at that time, which was not yet very well developed in comparison with large parts of Europe. Between 1927 and 1929 she worked on the Index of Christian Art project at Princeton University. The project founded by Charles Rufus Morey in 1918 was intended to train a new generation of American art historians who were to put a greater focus on the late antique, early Christian and Byzantine periods. Since Princeton was not yet accepting female students at that time, Frantz had to officially go to Columbia University for her doctoral studies , where Morey was nevertheless her doctoral supervisor for the degree in philosophy she had acquired in the 1930s . Her dissertation dealt with Byzantine ornaments .

In 1929 Frantz came to the country for the first time as a fellowship student at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and stayed there until 1930 as a librarian at the American School. During this time, attitudes towards Greece changed completely to a love for the country, which had now recovered a little from the aftermath of the lost war against young Turkey at the beginning of the decade . In 1934 she came to the US Agora excavation, which had been ongoing since 1931, in Athens , where she was initially assigned as an assistant to Lucy Talcott to help the latter with the finding, for whom Talcott had developed an extremely modern index card system including photographs at the time . Here she became part of a group of mostly younger and about half female archaeologists, including Talcott, Homer A. Thompson , Eugene Vanderpool , Benjamin Dean Meritt , Dorothy Burr , Virginia Grace , Margaret Crosby , Piet de Jong and Ioannis " John “Travlos belonged. Frantz was fascinated by photography as a child and assisted her older brother in developing his pictures in the darkroom. Thus from 1935 Frantz became the assistant of the free excavation photographer, the German Hermann Wagner . After Wagner left the excavation in 1939, Frantz became his successor and the first full-time photographer of the Agora excavation.

In contrast to Wagner, Frantz placed a much stronger focus on object photography and less on the photography of landscape and excavations outdoors. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in the summer of 1939, she was given the task of picking up more than 600 linear B tablets from Carl Blegen's excavations in the so-called Palace of Nestor in Pylos within two days , before they are safely stowed away in the National Bank of Greece should. Frantz mastered this task; their photos later became the basis for Michael Ventris' deciphering of the script . During the war, she worked for the Foreign Nationalities Branch (FNB) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from 1942 to 1945 . She was Carl Blegen's assistant in the Greece division and with this she provided the OSS FNB with information on Greece. Another part of her propaganda work was the publication of the illustrated book This is Greece , which she obtained with her lifelong friend and colleague Lucy Talcott.

After the war, Frantz was part of the Allied Mission for Observing Greek Elections in 1946, which observed the elections in August 1946. From 1946 to 1949 she worked as a cultural attaché at the US embassy in Greece and installed the Fulbright program in Greece as executive director . It was also thanks to the efforts of music lover Frantz that the Athens Symphony Orchestra could be adequately equipped again after the war.

After the Agora excavation was resumed in 1946, she returned there as a photographer and remained the responsible photographer until 1964. In addition to her scientific and photographic work, Frantz, who was also considered to be very elegant and distinguished, was also the foster mother of many generations of "agora cats" on the excavation site. In 1967 she received a grant from the American Philosophical Society to photograph the archaeological remains of the ancient temples on the Aegean island of Sikinos . It could also be proven that the alleged Temple of Apollo from the Hellenistic era was in fact a monumental grave from Roman times. For the period 1994/95 she was Research Felow at the American School at Athens. She died in a car accident at the age of 91.

Achievements, honors and bequests

Apostle Church on the Athens Agora

Frantz was highly regarded as an archaeological photographer. Especially in the photography of ancient Greek sculptures she achieved a great deal of skill. Her pictures of the Parthenon sculptures and the sculptures from the Temple of Zeus in Olympia were considered exemplary . In addition, she toured the Mediterranean including North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Europe to photograph archaeological sites. Her pictures enriched the books of many archaeologists of her time, including important publications by Gisela MA Richter , Bernard Ashmole and Martin Robertson . But Frantz also earned significant merits as an archaeologist. She urged that not only the classic finds from the Agora excavation be taken into account, but also finds from later epochs such as late antiquity , the Byzantine and Ottoman periods . She also dedicated her research to these finds and became a specialist in the archeology of those times. Together with the excavation architect John Travlos, she investigated the Apostle Church near the Stoa of Attalos on the site of the Agora. In spring 1954 she led the excavations and further investigations here. After the completion of this work, she and Travlos took care of a professional reconstruction and restoration of the church, removing the improper extensions from the 19th century and returning the building to its original state. She also wrote the scientific publication on the building, which appeared in 1971, and the publication of the late ancient findings on the Agora, which appeared in 1988.

Frantz was a member of the American Philosophical Society (1973), the Medieval Academy of America , the Archaeological Institute of America and the German Archaeological Institute . She also received the Greek Eupoieia Order . Smith College recognized her in 1967 as an outstanding graduate of the college in the humanities.

The M. Alison Frantz Fellowship in Post-Classical Studies at the Gennadius Library is named in honor of Frantz . Brian A. Sparkes dedicated his book The Red and the Black , published in 1996, to the memory of Lucy Talcott and Alison Frantz.

Frantz's photographic estate is now housed in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and her academic estate in the Manuscript Division of the Firestone Library at Princeton University .

Fonts (selection)

  • Byzantine Illuminated Ornament. A Study in Chronology. In: The Art Bulletin 16, 1934, pp. 43-76 (dissertation).
  • with Lucy Talcott : This is Greece. Hastings House, New York 1941.
  • The Middle Ages in the Athenian Agora (= Agora Picture Book , Volume 1). The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1959.
  • A land called Crete. Catalogs of exhibitions held Oct. 6 Nov 19, 1967. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton 1967.
  • The Church of the Holy Apostles (= Agora , Volume XX). The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1971.
  • with Martin Robertson ; The Parthenon Frieze. Phaidon for British Museum Publications, London 1975, ISBN 0714816590 .
  • Late Antiquity AD 267-700 (= Agora , Volume XXIV). The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1988.

literature

  • Lucy Shoe Meritt : A History of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 1939–1980. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1984, various pages ( digitized ).
  • Andrew Szegedy-Maszak: Portrait of a Purist. In: Archeology Volume 48, 1995, pp. 58-64
  • James R. McCredie : Alison Frantz, September 27, 1903 · February 1, 1995. In: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Volume 144, 2000, pp. 213-217 ( digitized ).
  • Amy Papalexandrou, Marie Mauzy: The Photographs of Alison Frantz: Revealing Antiquity through the Lens. In: History of Photography , Volume 27, 2003, pp. 130-143.
  • Susan I. Rotroff and Robert Lamberton: Women in the Athenian Agora. (= Agora Picture Book , Volume 26). American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 2006, ISBN 0876616449 , pp. 51-52.
  • Craig A. Mauzy: An Digging Story in Pictures. In: John McK. Camp II , Craig A. Mauzy (Editor): The Agora of Athens. New perspectives for an archaeological site. (= Zabern's illustrated books on archeology ). von Zabern, Mainz 2009, ISBN 978-3-8053-3789-2 , pp. 87–112, especially p. 99.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John K. Papadopoulos: Antiquity depicted. In: Claire L. Lyons, John K. Papadopoulos, Lindsey S. Stewart, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (editor): Antiquity and Photography. Early views of ancient mediterranean sites. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2005, ISBN 978-0-89236-805-1 , p. 2013 note 82.
  2. ^ To Live Alone and Like It: Women and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens Between the Wars. In: From the Archivist's Notebook. August 5, 2019, accessed on May 20, 2020 .
  3. ^ On Communism and Hellenism: An Archaeologist's Perspective. In: From the Archivist's Notebook. March 1, 2016, accessed May 20, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Wayback Machine. November 2, 2013, accessed May 20, 2020 . ; Alison Frantz photographs, 1939-1964. Retrieved May 20, 2020 .
  5. ^ To Live Alone and Like It: Women and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens Between the Wars. In: From the Archivist's Notebook. August 5, 2019, accessed May 20, 2020 .
  6. ^ Alison Frantz, Homer A. Thompson, John Travlos: The "Temple of Apollo Pythios" on Sikinos. In: American Journal of Archeology 73, 1969, pp. 397-422.
  7. ↑ Alison Frantz photographs, 1939-1964. Retrieved May 20, 2020 .
  8. ^ M. Alison Frantz Fellowship in Post-Classical Studies at the Gennadius Library - American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Retrieved May 20, 2020 .
  9. ^ Brian A. Sparkes: The Red and the Black. Studies in Greek Pottery. Routledge, London and New York 1996, ISBN 978-0-415-12661-8 .
  10. ^ The Alison Frantz Photographic Collection of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
  11. ↑ Alison Frantz Papers (C0772) - Alison Frantz Papers. Retrieved May 20, 2020 .
  12. ^ Catalog for an exhibition of photographs by Alison Frantz.
  13. ↑ Robertson contributed the texts, Frantz the photos for this illustrated book.
personal data
SURNAME Frantz, Alison
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frantz, Mary Alison; Frantz, M. Alison
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American archaeologist and photographer
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Duluth, Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 1995
Place of death New Brunswick